BAAD: a Biomass And Allometry Database for woody plants

Abstract

CABI:20153174020Understanding how plants are constructed - i.e., how key size dimensions and the amount of mass invested in different tissues varies among individuals - is essential for modeling plant growth, carbon stocks, and energy fluxes in the terrestrial biosphere. Allocation patterns can differ through ontogeny, but also among coexisting species and among species adapted to different environments. While a variety of models dealing with biomass allocation exist, we lack a synthetic understanding of the underlying processes. This is partly due to the lack of suitable data sets for validating and parameterizing models. To that end, we present the Biomass And Allometry Database (BAAD) for woody plants. The BAAD contains 259634 measurements collected in 176 different studies, from 21084 individuals across 678 species. Most of these data come from existing publications. However, raw data were rarely made public at the time of publication. Thus, the BAAD contains data from different studies, transformed into standard units and variable names. The transformations were achieved using a common workflow for all raw data files. Other features that distinguish the BAAD are: (i) measurements were for individual plants rather than stand averages; (ii) individuals spanning a range of sizes were measured; (iii) plants from 0.01-100 m in height were included; and (iv) biomass was estimated directly, i.e., not indirectly via allometric equations (except in very large trees where biomass was estimated from detailed sub-sampling). We included both wild and artificially grown plants. The data set contains the following size metrics: total leaf area; area of stem cross-section including sapwood, heartwood, and bark; height of plant and crown base, crown area, and surface area; and the dry mass of leaf, stem, branches, sapwood, heartwood, bark, coarse roots, and fine root tissues. We also report other properties of individuals (age, leaf size, leaf mass per area, wood density, nitrogen content of leaves and wood), as well as information about the growing environment (location, light, experimental treatment, vegetation type) where available. It is our hope that making these data available will improve our ability to understand plant growth, ecosystem dynamics, and carbon cycling in the world's vegetation

Evaluating Site-Specific and Generic Spatial Models of Aboveground Forest Biomass Based on Landsat Time-Series and LiDAR Strip Samples in the Eastern USA

“…For example, the tree AGB models developed by Jenkins et al [19] for 10 species groups in the continental USA are widely used in North America, despite large biogeoclimatic gradients across the continent. The concerted efforts in recent years to create legacy tree databases based on past studies across a large region (e.g., Falster et al [20]; www.legacytreedata.org) have also facilitated formulation of generic models. However, a drawback of these generalized models is that they ignore the effects of local site characteristics on tree growth [21,22].…”

A Percolation‐Based Approach to Scaling Infiltration and Evapotranspiration

“…As shown in Figure 2, these values of x (t g ) bound the world's plant heights [31] at a time corresponding to the length of the growing season, meaning that Equation (7) generates essentially identical scaling predictions of plant growth rates as depicted in Figure 1.…”

“…Experimental data used for the analysis in this study are from three databases: (1) Falster et al [31]; (2) Hunt [9] and (3) Sharma et al [32]. The Biometric and Allometric Database (BAAD), in [31] includes allometric data that consist of height and age for plantation species as well as from plants growing under natural conditions.…”

“…The Biometric and Allometric Database (BAAD), in [31] includes allometric data that consist of height and age for plantation species as well as from plants growing under natural conditions. The data points from plants grown in natural conditions, i.e., 5539 out of 6650 are used to compare with the percolation theory scaling relationship.…”

“…The data of [31] Falster et al (2015) is a compilation performed by many authors over many years of dozens of studies worldwide. Note that regnans minimum and maximum predictions are generated from the range in adult Eucalyptus regnans heights (a factor 22) across a precipitation gradient [41] together with the demonstration [10], that all Eucalyptus growth rates in the study of [42] followed the scaling of Equation (6), but with variations in the t 0 values consistent with a gradation of flow rates across their study sites.…”