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The difference between above- and below-ground self-thinning lines in forest communities

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Ecological Research

Abstract

Quantifying the self-thinning process in various plant communities has been a long-standing issue in both theoretical and empirical studies. Most studies on plant self-thinning have centered only on aboveground parts, and rarely on belowground parts. There is still a general lack of comparison between above- and belowground self-thinning processes, especially for forest communities. The fundamental mechanistic difference and the functional association between above- and belowground competition indicate that the self-thinning process of belowground parts may be different from that of aboveground parts. We investigated the self-thinning lines for above-ground (M A), below-ground (M B), and total biomass (M T), respectively, across forest communities in China. The results showed that neither the classical self-thinning rule (−3/2 exponent) nor the universal scaling rule (−4/3 exponent) can apply to all the self-thinning relationships across these forest communities and that the self-thinning lines for belowground biomass were flatter and lower than those for aboveground biomass across most of these forest communities.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the handling editor Kihachiro Kikuzawa for valuable comments and suggestions. The authors thank Dr. Tianxiang Luo (Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China) for providing helpful information for this paper. The study was financially supported by the National High Technology Development 863 Project of China 2006AA100202, and NSFC projects 30871470 and 30730020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Wei-Ping Zhang, Xin Jia, Yan-Yuan Bai & Gen-Xuan Wang

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  1. Wei-Ping Zhang
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  2. Xin Jia
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  3. Yan-Yuan Bai
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  4. Gen-Xuan Wang
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Correspondence to Gen-Xuan Wang.

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Zhang, WP., Jia, X., Bai, YY. et al. The difference between above- and below-ground self-thinning lines in forest communities. Ecol Res 26, 819–825 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-011-0843-2

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