How much biomass can plant communities pack per unit volume?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Ecosystem Science, Plant Science
- Keywords
- Packing density, Biodiversity, Plant geometry, Ecosystem, Self-thinning, Species coexistence
- Copyright
- © 2014 Proulx et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. How much biomass can plant communities pack per unit volume? PeerJ PrePrints 2:e677v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.677v1
Abstract
Aboveground production in terrestrial plant communities is commonly expressed in amount of carbon, or biomass, per unit surface. Alternatively, expressing production per unit volume allows the comparison of communities by their fundamental limits in packing carbon. In this work we reanalyzed published data from more than 900 plant communities across nine ecosystems to show that standing dry biomass per unit volume (biomass packing) consistently averages around 1 kg/m3 and rarely exceeds 5 kg/m3 across ecosystem types. Furthermore, we examined how empirical relationships between aboveground production and plant species richness are modified when standing biomass is expressed per unit volume rather than surface. We propose that biomass packing emphasizes species coexistence mechanisms and is an indicator of resource use efficiency in plant communities.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.