Volkov, IgorTovo, AnnaAnfodillo, TommasoRinaldo, AndreaMaritan, AmosBanavar, Jayanth R.2023-10-102023-10-102022-03-10Igor Volkov, Anna Tovo, Tommaso Anfodillo, Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Jayanth R Banavar, Seeing the forest for the trees through metabolic scaling, PNAS Nexus, Volume 1, Issue 1, March 2022, pgac008, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac008https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac008https://hdl.handle.net/1794/289658 pagesWe demonstrate that when power scaling occurs for an individual tree and in a forest, there is great resulting simplicity notwithstanding the underlying complexity characterizing the system over many size scales. Our scaling framework unifies seemingly distinct trends in a forest and provides a simple yet promising approach to quantitatively understand a bewilderingly complex many-body system with imperfectly known interactions. We show that the effective dimension, Dtree, of a tree is close to 3, whereas a mature forest has Dforest approaching 1. We discuss the energy equivalence rule and show that the metabolic rate–mass relationship is a power law with an exponent D/(D + 1) in both cases leading to a Kleiber’s exponent of 3/4 for a tree and 1/2 for a forest. Our work has implications for understanding carbon sequestration and for climate science.enCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USClimate scienceScalingForestsEcologyCarbon sequestrationArticle