Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size

By N. Stephenson, Adrian J. Das, Richard S. Condit, S. Russo, P. Baker, N. Beckman, David A. Coomes, E. Lines, W. Morris, Nadja Rüger and 28 more. Nature, 2014

977 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Forests are major components of the global carbon cycle, providing substantial feedback to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Our ability to understand and predict changes in the forest carbon cycle—particularly net primary productivity and carbon storage—increasingly relies on models that represent biological processes across several scales of biological organization, from tree leaves to forest stands. Yet, despite advances in our understanding of productivity at the scales of leaves and stands, no consensus exists about the nature of productivity at the scale of the individual tree, in part because we lack a broad empirical assessment of whether rates of absolute tree mass growth (and thus carbon accumulation) decrease, remain constant, or increase as trees increase in size and age. Here we present a global analysis of 403 tropical and temperate tree species, showing that for most species mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size. Thus, large, old trees do not act simply as senescent carbon reservoirs but actively fix large amounts of carbon compared to smaller trees; at the extreme, a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree. The apparent paradoxes of individual tree growth increasing with tree size despite declining leaf-level and stand-level productivity can be explained, respectively, by increases in a tree’s total leaf area that outpace declines in productivity per unit of leaf area and, among other factors, age-related reductions in population density. Our results resolve conflicting assumptions about the nature of tree growth, inform efforts to undertand and model forest carbon dynamics, and have additional implications for theories of resource allocation and plant senescence.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6094948c2ac9d8a6cdee71c8856f942331533883

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Citations in the corpus

Aboveground carbon storage is driven by functional trait composition and stand structural attributes rather than biodiversity in temperate mixed forests recovering from disturbances (2018, background): “trees contributed disproportionally to stand-level carbon storage compared with small trees (Stephenson et al. 2014; Ali and Yan 2017b).”
Conservative species drive biomass productivity in tropical dry forests (2016, background): “We predicted that biomass growth of surviving trees is higher in forests with higher initial stand biomass, because most trees initially present survive during the census, and the more biomass they initially have, the faster they can grow (cf. Stephenson et al. 2014).”
Being John Harper: Using evolutionary ideas to improve understanding of global patterns in plant traits (2018, background): “The rate (mg/year) of carbon accumulation of individual plants generally increases with increasing tree size (Stephenson et al., 2014).”
Global importance of large‐diameter trees (2018, background): “The generally high proportion of biomass represented by the largest 1% of trees reinforces the importance of these individuals to carbon sequestration and productivity (e.g., Stephenson et al., 2014).”
CTFS‐ForestGEO: a worldwide network monitoring forests in an era of global change (2015, background): “Census typically repeated every 5 years Characterize demographic rates and changes therein (Russo et al., 2005; MullerLandau et al., 2006a,b; Feeley et al., 2007a; Lai et al., 2013; Stephenson et al., 2014); characterize changes in community composition (Losos & Leigh, 2004; Chave et al.”
Forests and Decarbonization – Roles of Natural and Planted Forests (2020, background): “Moreover, it is possible for a single large tree to produce more new wood in a single year than is contained in the entire biomass of a smaller individual tree (Stephenson et al., 2014).”
Abiotic and biotic drivers of biomass change in a Neotropical forest (2017, background): “Therefore, a higher initial basal area of surviving trees resulted in higher growth rates, especially since many of these trees are large and contribute most to growth (Stephenson et al. 2014).”
Patterns and Mechanisms of Nutrient Resorption in Plants (2015, background): “The nutrient allocation to plant tissues shifts from foliage to woody tissues as trees age (Vitousek and Reiners, 1975), where trees may allocate considerably more biomass to stemwood as tree sizes increase (Stephenson et al., 2014).”
Scaling from Traits to Ecosystems: Developing a General Trait Driver Theory via Integrating Trait-Based and Metabolic Scaling Theories (2015, background): “Equation (6) has recently been 265Scaling from Traits to Ecosystems shown to be a good characterization of tree growth (Stephenson et al., 2014) and is a specific case of a more generic growth function (Moses et al., 2008; West et al., 2001) that can be applied to both plants and animals.”
Nondestructive estimates of above‐ground biomass using terrestrial laser scanning (2015, methodology): “This is particularly true for large trees which contain most of the biomass (and thus carbon) but have rarely been harvested and measured (Stephenson et al. 2014).”
Mangrove diversity enhances plant biomass production and carbon storage in Hainan island, China (2021, background): “This phenomenon has been well demonstrated in a number of studies that demonstrate that tree carbon accumulation increases continu - ously with tree size; 70% of the variation in biomass was determined by tree size (Stephenson et al., 2014).”