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Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size

Stephenson, N. L., Das, A. J., Condit, R., Russo, S. E., Baker, P. J., Beckman, N. G., Coomes, D. A., Lines, E. R., Morris, W. K., Rüger, N., Álvarez, E., Blundo, C., Bunyavejchewin, S., Chuyong, G., Davies, S. J., Duque, Á., Ewango, C. N., Flores, O., Franklin, J. F., Grau, H. R., Hao, Z., Harmon, M. E., Hubbell, S. P., Kenfack, D., Lin, Y., Makana, J.-R., Malizia, A., Malizia, L. R., Pabst, R. J., Pongpattananurak, N., Su, S.-H., Sun, I-F., Tan, S., Thomas, D., van Mantgem, P. J., Wang, X., Wiser, S. K., Zavala, M. A.·2014·Nature
DOI 10.1038/nature12914
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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 (and thus carbon accumulation) decrease, remain constant, or increase as trees increase in size and age. Here we present a global analysis of 403 tropical and temperate tree species, showing that for most species mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size. Thus, large, old trees do not act simply as senescent carbon reservoirs but actively fix large amounts of carbon compared to smaller trees; at the extreme, a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree. The apparent paradoxes of individual tree growth increasing with tree size despite declining leaf-level and stand-level productivity can be explained, respectively, by increases in a tree's total leaf area that outpace declines in productivity per u…

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Metadata

Authors
Stephenson, N. L., Das, A. J., Condit, R., Russo, S. E., Baker, P. J., Beckman, N. G., Coomes, D. A., Lines, E. R., Morris, W. K., Rüger, N., Álvarez, E., Blundo, C., Bunyavejchewin, S., Chuyong, G., Davies, S. J., Duque, Á., Ewango, C. N., Flores, O., Franklin, J. F., Grau, H. R., Hao, Z., Harmon, M. E., Hubbell, S. P., Kenfack, D., Lin, Y., Makana, J.-R., Malizia, A., Malizia, L. R., Pabst, R. J., Pongpattananurak, N., Su, S.-H., Sun, I.-F., Tan, S., Thomas, D., van Mantgem, P. J., Wang, X., Wiser, S. K., & Zavala, M. A.
Venue
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2014-01-15
Volume
507
Issue
7490
Pages
90-93
ISSN
  • 0028-0836
  • 1476-4687
DOI
10.1038/nature12914
Cited by
897
References
2
Language
en
Licence
www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)

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