Testing the Growth Rate Hypothesis in Vascular Plants with Above- and Below-Ground Biomass

The growth rate hypothesis (GRH) proposes that higher growth rate (the rate of change in biomass per unit biomass, μ) is associated with higher P concentration and lower C∶P and N∶P ratios. However, the applicability of the GRH to vascular plants is not well-studied and few studies have been done on belowground biomass. Here we showed that, for aboveground, belowground and total biomass of three study species, μ was positively correlated with N∶C under N limitation and positively correlated with P∶C under P limitation. However, the N∶P ratio was a unimodal function of μ, increasing for small values of μ, reaching a maximum, and then decreasing. The range of variations in μ was positively correlated with variation in C∶N∶P stoichiometry. Furthermore, μ and C∶N∶P ranges for aboveground biomass were negatively correlated with those for belowground. Our results confirm the well-known association of growth rate with tissue concentration of the limiting nutrient and provide empirical support for recent theoretical formulations.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2012-03-13

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0032162PMID 22427823PMCID 3302800
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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