Influence of Leaf Age on the Scaling Relationships of Lamina Mass vs. Area

Abstract

Leaf lamina mass and area are closely correlated with the photosynthetic capacity and competitive ability of plants, whereas leaf age has been demonstrated to affect physiological processes such as photosynthesis. However, it remains unknown whether the lamina mass vs. area scaling relationship is influenced by leaf age, which is important for understanding plant adaptive strategies and, more broadly, resource utilization and growth. We measured the leaf functional traits of five leaf-age groups of Photinia × fraseri for a total of 1,736 leaves. ANOVA followed by Tukey’s honestly significant difference test was used to compare the functional traits among the five leaf-age groups. Reduced major axis regression protocols were used to fit the scaling relationship between lamina mass and area, and the bootstrap percentile method was used to compare the lamina mass vs. area scaling relationships among the leaf-age groups. Lamina area, and the ratio of lamina dry mass to lamina fresh mass increased with increasing leaf age. Lamina fresh mass per unit area, and lamina dry mass per unit area both exhibited a parabolic-like trend as leaf age increased, i.e., at the leaf maturation stage, it showed a slight but significant decline. The phenomenon called diminishing returns were confirmed by each of the five leaf-age groups, i.e., all of the numerical values of the scaling exponents of lamina mass vs. area were significantly greater than 1. There were significant differences in the scaling exponents of lamina mass vs. area for the leaves across different sampling times. The scaling exponents were lower at the early rapid growth stage, indicating a lower cost for increasing leaf area compared to the leaf maturation stage. These data are consistent with leaves undergoing a transition from resource acquisition to resource conservation in the process of their development and growth.

Diminishing returns: A comparison between fresh mass vs. area and dry mass vs. area in deciduous species

“…It is obvious that relationship between FM and lamina A depends on both the leaf water content and the dry mass content across all of the species examined in this study. FM depends on the availability of water in the local environment, whereas leaf dry mass is unresponsive to variations in water availability after leaf expansion ( Jiao et al., 2022 ). For this reason, all of the leaves used in the present study were sampled at the same season and daytime of day in an effort to limit the effect of rainfall on leaf fresh mass and its effect on the r 2 of FM vs. A .…”

“…Although the non-linear terms were found to be significant for the M vs. A scaling relationship for some datasets, the PE values nevertheless showed that the addition of the non-linear term did not improve the significance of correlations and unnecessarily increased the model complexity and was, therefore, unnecessary and a distraction It is obvious that relationship between FM and lamina A depends on both the leaf water content and the dry mass content across all of the species examined in this study. FM depends on the availability of water in the local environment, whereas leaf dry mass is unresponsive to variations in water availability after leaf expansion (Jiao et al, 2022). For this reason, all of the leaves used in the present study were sampled at the same season and daytime of day in an effort to limit the effect of rainfall on leaf fresh mass and its effect on the r 2 of FM vs. A.…”

Sources and consequences of mismatch between leaf disc and whole‐leaf leaf mass per area (LMA)

“…This result is due to the large discrepancy in the whole-leaf to leaf-disc LMA for large leaves and can be explained by scaling relationships between leaf mass and leaf area called "diminishing returns" (Niklas et al, 2007), whereby increases in leaf dry mass including petioles do not result in a proportional increase in leaf area including petioles (Li et al, 2022a). This effect is generally strong for mature leaves (Jiao et al, 2022). "Diminishing returns" can be either described as the scaling slope of leaf area in Model 1 or the scaling slope of leaf-disc LMA and the intercept in the Model 3.…”

Environmental Drivers of Landscape Fragmentation Influence Intraspecific Leaf Traits in Forest Ecosystem

“…Ecological research targeting functional traits can help elucidate the response of natural ecosystems to ongoing global anthropogenic changes [28]. Leaf traits such as leaf area (LA), specific leaf area (SLA), leaf dry matter content (LDMC), and leaf thickness (Lth), which are the most commonly used and easily measured functional leaf traits, can reflect resource-uptake strategies and resource-use efficiency [29][30][31][32]. For example, LA predicts light interception, evapotranspiration, photosynthetic efficiency, plant growth, and stress tolerance [33].…”