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Sci Tech
Stems and leaves proportional to roots
ADD THIS universal truth to all the biology textbooks: the mass of a plant's leaves and stems is very much proportionally scaled to that of its roots in a mathematically predictable way, regardless of species or habitat.
In other words, biologists can now reasonably estimate how much biomass is underground just by looking at the stems and leaves above ground.
Up to now, plant biologists could only theorise about the ways stem and leaf biomass relate to root biomass across the vast spectrum of land plants.
Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Arizona pored over data for a vast array of plants from weeds to bushes to trees in order to derive mass-proportional relations among major plant parts.
This evidence now provides environmental researchers with clues to how much carbon is stored in plants below and above ground.
"Global climate modelers now can reasonably estimate how much carbon is sequestered in plants on a worldwide basis," says Karl J. Niklas, Cornell's Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Biology, whose article appears in the journal Science.
The scientists wanted to know if there were observable, universal patterns of biomass storage across all plant species in different habitats, and they wanted to know if such patterns could be predicted.
"These patterns can be found in any known terrestrial plant, whether you are talking about bamboo, or palm trees, or pine trees or bushes. The same pattern can be found across the whole spectrum of all the plants on land." Using a mathematically based research method called allometry, which studies the relative growth rates and proportions of different-size parts of organisms, Niklas and Enquist developed biophysical models that would link data on hundreds of specific plants.
They studied all the plant species differing radically in overall size (from giant oak trees to some of the smallest flowering plants such as mouse-ear cress). The researchers found that the proportions of the plant's leaf, stem, and root biomass remain, on average, constant.
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