On the general relationship between plant height and aboveground biomass of vegetation stands in contrasted ecosystems

Abstract

Ecological communities are unique assemblages of species that coexist in consequence of multi-causal processes that have proven hard to generalize. One possible exception are processes that control the biomass packing of vegetation stands; the amount of aboveground standing biomass expressed per unit volume. In this paper, I investigated the empirical and geometric underpinnings of biomass packing in terrestrial plant communities. I support that biomass packing in nature peaks around 1 kg m-3 across contrasted contexts, ranging from grasslands to forest ecosystems. Using published experimental and long-term survey data, I show that expressing biomass per unit volume cancels the effects of air temperature, species richness and soil fertility on aboveground stocks, thus providing a general comparative measure of storage efficiency in plant communities.