8 research outputs found
Methane soil surface flux and methane-driving microorganisms in a permafrost-affected forest ecosystem: does temperature influence methane flux?
Methane soil surface flux and methane-driving microorganisms in forest ecosystems underlying per¬mafrost: functioning in a changing environment
Methane flux from soil surface in a boreal forest of the Siberian continuous-permafrost zone
Methane soil surface flux and methane-driving microorganisms in Central Siberia boreal forests
Soil respiration in larch and pine ecosystems of the Krasnoyarsk region (Russian Federation): a latitudinal comparative study
Influence of temperature on fractional composition of proteins and respiration of germinating seeds of Gmelin and Siberian larch
Mixed-power scaling of whole-plant respiration from seedlings to giant trees
The scaling of respiratory metabolism with body mass is one of the most pervasive phenomena in biology. Using a single allometric equation to characterize empirical scaling relationships and to evaluate alternative hypotheses about mechanisms has been controversial. We developed a method to directly measure respiration of 271 whole plants, spanning nine orders of magnitude in body mass, from small seedlings to large trees, and from tropical to boreal ecosystems. Our measurements include the roots, which have often been ignored. Rather than a single power-law relationship, our data are fit by a biphasic, mixed-power function. The allometric exponent varies continuously from 1 in the smallest plants to 3/4 in larger saplings and trees. Therefore, our findings support the recent findings of Reich et al. [Reich PB, Tjoelker MG, Machado JL, Oleksyn J (2006) Universal scaling of respiratory metabolism, size, and nitrogen in plants. Nature 439:457–461] and West, Brown, and Enquist [West GB, Brown JH, Enquist BJ (1997) A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology. Science 276:122 -126.]. The transition from linear to 3/4-power scaling may indicate fundamental physical and physiological constraints on the allocation of plant biomass between photosynthetic and nonphotosynthetic organs over the course of ontogenetic plant growth