| Summary: | To model plant growth, ecologists have integrated metabolism into allometric equations, most notoriously known in the West Brown Enquist model, which is an extension of the all-inclusive Metabolic Scaling Theory (MST) (West et al. 1999). This formula takes form of the power function Ṁ = βMᶿ, where β is the allometric normalization constant, M is total biomass, θ is a scaling exponent, and Ṁ is the metabolic and thus growth rate of the organism. Kleiber's law assumes that M should scale to the ¾ power, and the WBE model supports this claim. To test this, we measured the growth rate of 64 trees on Mount Bigelow, Arizona and showed that Ṁ scales in proportion to M. While there are many external factors that influence plant growth, we focused on modeling two types of functional traits: leaf-based and hydraulic-based. Our results show that the theoretical Ṁ from both equations are significantly different than 1, and we conclude that the WBE model may not include all variables relating to plant growth.
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