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Does the law of diminishing returns in leaf scaling apply to vines? - Evidence from 12 species of climbing plants
Citation
Shi, P and Li, Y and Hui, C and Ratkowsky, DA and Yu, X and Niinemets, U, Does the law of diminishing returns in leaf scaling apply to vines? - Evidence from 12 species of climbing plants, Global Ecology and Conservation, 21 Article e00830. ISSN 2351-9894 (2019) [Refereed Article]
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Copyright Statement
© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
DOI: doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2019.e00830
Abstract
Shapes, sizes and biomass investment per unit area (LMA) of vine leaves are characterized by high diversity that results in variation in leaf arrangement, light harvesting efficiency and photosynthetic activity. There exists a scaling relationship between leaf dry mass and surface area for many broad-leaved plants, and most estimates of the scaling exponent are greater than unity, implying that they follow the "law of diminishing returns", i.e. that larger leaves require progressively greater investments of dry mass and accordingly have a greater LMA. Previous studies have primarily focused on trees and crops and there are few data available for vines. Yet, as vines have lower support investments in stems than self-supporting plants, they can have larger biomass investments in support within the leaves and stronger rise of biomass costs with increasing leaf area. In this study, we chose twelve species of vines (five woody vines and seven herbaceous vines) to investigate the following scientific questions: (i) whether there are significant differences in LMA between woody and herbaceous vines, (ii) whether leaf dry mass and surface area scaling relationships show evidence of diminishing returns in vines.We observed that LMA values of woody vines were significantly higher than those of the herbaceous vines. Leaf dry mass vs. surface area scaling relationship followed the law of diminishing returns in all 12 studied vine species. The existence of diminishing returns indicates that there is a trade-off between leaf surface area expansion and the energy investment for vines to support leaf physical structures.
Item Details
| Item Type: | Refereed Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | climbing plants, diminishing returns, herbaceous vines, leaf dry mass per unit area, woody vines |
| Research Division: | Biological Sciences |
| Research Group: | Plant biology |
| Research Field: | Plant developmental and reproductive biology |
| Objective Division: | Expanding Knowledge |
| Objective Group: | Expanding knowledge |
| Objective Field: | Expanding knowledge in the biological sciences |
| UTAS Author: | Ratkowsky, DA (Dr David Ratkowsky) |
| ID Code: | 135951 |
| Year Published: | 2019 |
| Web of Science® Times Cited: | 21 |
| Deposited By: | TIA - Research Institute |
| Deposited On: | 2019-11-22 |
| Last Modified: | 2020-04-01 |
| Downloads: | 23 View Download Statistics |
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