The relationship between the aboveground dry weight and diameter for a wide size range of erect land plants

Abstract

For 765 stems of plants that spanned eight orders of magnitude of aboveground dry weight (DWT) and three orders of magnitude of stem diameter (DIAM), a plot of log10DWT vs. log10DIAM was highly linear, with an r2 value of 0.997 and a slope of 2.6. The value of this slope may be related to the minimum diameters that are required by upright plants to withstand the horizontal forces of drag that arc exerted at high wind speeds. The multispecies biomass regression gave a similar estimate of the standing crop of a conifer stand to that computed using species- and site-specific tree regressions, indicating the possible general use of such equations in estimating the standing crops of terrestrial ecosystems.