Fibre wall and lumen fractions drive wood density variation across 24 Australian angiosperms

Wood density is often considered to be a key plant functional trait. But it is not clear what actually wood density is? We rigorously quantified anatomical underpinnings of wood density variation. We found that density was mainly driven by properties of mechanical tissue such as fibre wall fraction and fibre lumen fraction. However, there was also a substantial anatomical variation independent of density. This variation suggests that different plant ecological strategies may be available to woods with the same density. Our results imply that density is a complex characteristic of wood rather than a straightforward indicator of plant ecological strategies.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  AoB Plants

• Publication date

  2013-10-10

• Fields of study

  Biology, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/aobpla/plt046PMCID 4104653
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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