Biophysical dependences among functional wood traits

Abstract

Wood properties and especially wood density have been used as functional traits organized along major axes of species life history and strategy. Beyond statistical analyses, a better mechanistic understanding of relationships among wood traits is essential for ecologically relevant interpretation of wood trait variations. A set of theoretical relationships mechanistically linking wood basic density with some other wood traits is derived from cellular material physics. These theoretical models picture basic physical constraints and thus provide null hypotheses for further ecological studies. Analysis is applied to data from two original datasets and several datasets extracted from the literature. Results emphasize the strong physical constraint behind the link between basic density and maximal storable water on the one hand, and elastic modulus on the other hand. Beyond these basic physical constraints, the developed framework reveals physically less expected trends: the amount of free water available for physiological needs increases in less dense wood of fast‐growing species, and the cell wall stiffness decreases with density in temperate hardwoods and is higher in sapling stages in the rainforest understorey where competition for light is associated with high mechanical risk. We emphasize the use of theoretically independent traits derived from models of cellular material physics to investigate the functional variation of wood traits together with their environmental and phylogenetic variations. Although the current study is limited to basic density, green wood lumen saturation and wood specific modulus, we further emphasize the identification of complementary independent wood traits representing other biomechanical functions, nutrient storage, hydraulic conductance and resistance to drought. A http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13209/suppinfo is available for this article.

Wood day capacitance is related to water content, wood density, and anatomy across 30 temperate tree species

“…Moreover, we estimated that the amount of wall-bound water was considerable (VWC W-pd mean: 0.16 ± 0.03) in comparison with lumen water content (VWC L-pd average: 0.25 ± 0.09, Figure 2a). Although, these estimates may include some error associated with our assumptions (i.e., M FSP = 1.3 * M D ), which has been questioned previously (Dlouhá et al, 2018;Kellogg & Wangaard, 1969), our findings highlight the need to better understand the mechanistic linkages between capacitance and the different sources of water in wood tissues.…”

Three-dimensional printing, muscles, and skeleton: mechanical functions of living wood

“…Thus, wood density is directly related to the ratio of cell diameter to cell wall thickness, which is known to be the main driver for the properties of cellular material (Gibson and Ashby, 1997;Kretschmann, 2010). However, wood density also depends on moisture content (Glass and Zelinka, 2010), that is, the sum of water molecules inserted inside the hydrophilic cell wall polymers and of 'free' water present inside the cell lumens in association with gas Dlouhá et al, 2018). For wood as an engineering material, the reference is the density at 12% moisture content (D 12 ).…”

“…Again, a proportional relationship can be defined between these two parameters: BSM=0.86×SM 12 , with a fairly good precision for all species (Glass and Zelinka, 2010). There is no correlation between specific m odulus ( or B SM) a nd d ensity (or BD) as determined in a large number of trees (2234) and species (601) (Dlouhá et al, 2018), and the two descriptors of wood maturation can be viewed as independent.…”

Incremento del módulo dinámico por efecto del densificado en ocho maderas mexicanas

“…La densidad de la madera es uno de sus principales rasgos funcionales [1] y se considera un buen predictor del módulo de elasticidad [2] . Igualmente, la densidad es la característica de referencia para pronosticar el módulo dinámico [3] e interviene en la configuración del índice de calidad para sugerir su uso como material de ingeniería [4].…”