Department of Earth Sciences

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Beginning September 1, 2016 the department changed its name from the Department of Geological Sciences to the Department of Earth Sciences.

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Open Access
Seeing the forest for the trees through metabolic scaling
(Oxford Academic, 2022-03-10) Volkov, Igor; Tovo, Anna; Anfodillo, Tommaso; Rinaldo, Andrea; Maritan, Amos; Banavar, Jayanth R.
We 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.