Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 503

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 82 of the 82 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Phylogenetic and Growth Form Variation in the Scaling of Nitrogen and Phosphorus in the Seed Plants

Kerkhoff, Andrew J., Fagan, William F., Elser, James J., Enquist, Brian J.·2006·The American Naturalist

Abstract

Plant biomass and nutrient allocation explicitly links the evolved strategies of plant species to the material and energy cycles of ecosystems. Allocation of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) is of particular interest because N and P play pivotal roles in many aspects of plant biology, and their availability frequently limits plant growth. Here we present a comparative scaling analysis of a global data compilation detailing the N and P contents of leaves, stems, roots, and reproductive structures of 1,287 species in 152 seed plant families. We find that P and N contents (as well as N : P) are generally highly correlated both within and across organs and that differences exist between woody and herbaceous taxa. Between plant organs, the quantitative form of the scaling relationship changes systematically, depending on whether the organs considered are primarily structural (i.e., stems, roots) or metabolically active (i.e., leaves, reproductive structures). While we find significant phylogenetic signals in the data, similar scaling relationships occur in independently evolving plant lineages, which implies that both the contingencies of evolutionary history and some degree of environmental convergence have led to a common set of rules that constrain the partitioning of nutrients among plant organs.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/507879

Cites

82 of 82 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 82 references

Cited by

See all 503

Metadata

Authors
Kerkhoff, A. J., Fagan, W. F., Elser, J. J., & Enquist, B. J.
Venue
The American Naturalist
Published
2006-10
Volume
168
Issue
4
Pages
E103-E122
ISSN
  • 0003-0147 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5323
OpenAlex
W2101789542
Cited by
503
References
82
FWCI
12.39
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Phylogenetic and Growth Form Variation in the Scaling of Nitrogen and Phosphorus in the Seed Plants. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/507879
The paper
Kerkhoff, A. J., Fagan, W. F., Elser, J. J., & Enquist, B. J. (2006). Phylogenetic and Growth Form Variation in the Scaling of Nitrogen and Phosphorus in the Seed Plants. The American Naturalist. https://doi.org/10.1086/507879

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.