Journal article
Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size
NL Stephenson, AJ Das, R Condit, SE Russo, PJ Baker, NG Beckman, DA Coomes, ER Lines, WK Morris, N Rüger, E Álvarez, C Blundo, S Bunyavejchewin, G Chuyong, SJ Davies, A Duque, CN Ewango, O Flores, JF Franklin, HR Grau Show all
Nature | Published : 2014
DOI: 10.1038/nature12914
Abstract
Forests are major components of the global carbon cycle, providing substantial feedback to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Our ability to understand and predict changes in the forest carbon cycle-particularly net primary productivity and carbon storage-increasingly relies on models that represent biological processes across several scales of biological organization, from tree leaves to forest stands. Yet, despite advances in our understanding of productivity at the scales of leaves and stands, no consensus exists about the nature of productivity at the scale of the individual tree, in part because we lack a broad empirical assessment of whether rates of absolute tree mass growth (..
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Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the hundreds of people who have established and maintained the forest plots and their associated databases; M. G. Ryan for comments on the manuscript; C. D. Canham and T. Hart for supplying data; C. D. Canham for discussions and feedback; J. S. Baron for hosting our workshops; and Spain's Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentacion y Medio Ambiente (MAGRAMA) for granting access to the Spanish Forest Inventory Data. Our analyses were supported by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis, the USGS Ecosystems and Climate and Land Use Change mission areas, the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory-Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS), and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln Program of Excellence in Population Biology Postdoctoral Fellowship (to N.G.B.). In addition, X. W. was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31370444) and State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology (LFSE2013-11). Data collection was funded by a broad range of organizations including the USGS, the CTFS, the US National Science Foundation, the Andrews LTER (NSF-LTER DEB-0823380), the US National Park Service, the US Forest Service (USFS), the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MAGRAMA, the Council of Agriculture of Taiwan, the National Science Council of Taiwan, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Landcare Research and the National Vegetation Survey Database (NVS) of New Zealand, the French Fund for the Global Environment and Fundacion ProYungas. This paper is a contribution from the Western Mountain Initiative, a USGS global change research project. Any use of trade names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the USA government.