We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Nitrogen/phosphorus leaf stoichiometry and the scaling of plant growth.
- Authors
Niklas, Karl J.; Owens, Thomas; Reich, Peter B.; Cobb, Edward D.; Chave, Jerome
- Abstract
We adopted previous N : P stoichiometric models for zooplankton relative growth to predict the relative growth rates of the leavesμL of vascular plants assuming that annual leaf growth in dry mass is dictated by how leaf nitrogenNL is allocated to leaf proteins and how leaf phosphorusPL is allocated to rRNA. This model is simplified provided thatNL scales as some power function ofPL across the leaves of different species. This approach successfully predicted theμL of 131 species of vascular plants based on the observation that, across these species,NL scaled, on average, as the 3/4 power ofPL, i.e.NL ∝ P. When juxtaposed with prior allometric theory and observations, our findings suggest that a transformation in N : P stoichiometry occurs when the plant body undergoes a transition from primary to secondary growth.
- Subjects
STOICHIOMETRY; ZOOPLANKTON; PLANT growth; BOTANY; LEAF proteins; ALLOMETRY in plants; RNA-protein interactions
- Publication
Ecology Letters, 2005, Vol 8, Issue 6, p636
- ISSN
1461-023X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00759.x