How much biomass can plant communities pack per unit volume?

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  Département des Sciences de l’Environnement / Canada Research Chair in Ecological Integrity, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.677v1
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
Proulx R, Rheault G, Bonin L, Roca IT, Martin CA, Desrochers L, Seiferling IS. 2014. How much biomass can plant communities pack per unit volume? PeerJ PrePrints 2:e677v1

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.