Seeing the forest for the trees through metabolic scaling
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Date
2022-03-10
Authors
Volkov, Igor
Tovo, Anna
Anfodillo, Tommaso
Rinaldo, Andrea
Maritan, Amos
Banavar, Jayanth R.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Oxford Academic
Abstract
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.
Description
8 pages
Keywords
Climate science, Scaling, Forests, Ecology, Carbon sequestration
Citation
Igor 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/pgac008