Canada Research Chair in Ecological Integrity, Centre de recherche sur les interactions bassins versants-écosystèmes aquatiques, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Canada.
PLoS One. 2021 May 26;16(5):e0252080. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252080. eCollection 2021.
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.
生态群落是物种的独特组合，它们由于多因果过程而共存，这些过程很难概括。一个可能的例外是控制植被生物量堆积的过程；即每单位体积表达的地上直立生物量。在本文中，我研究了陆地植物群落中生物量堆积的经验和几何基础。我支持在自然环境中，生物量堆积在 1 公斤/立方米左右达到峰值，范围从草原到森林生态系统。利用已发表的实验和长期调查数据，我表明，按单位体积表达生物量可以消除空气温度、物种丰富度和土壤肥力对地上存量的影响，从而为植物群落的存储效率提供一个通用的比较衡量标准。
