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Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size

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  • Forests are major components of the global carbon cycle, providing substantial feedback to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations¹. 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[superscript 2,3]. 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[superscript 4–7], 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[superscript 8–10] and stand-level¹⁰ 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 understand and model forest carbon dynamics, and have additional implications for theories of resource allocation¹¹ and plant senescence¹².
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  • Stephenson, N. L., Das, A. J., Condit, R., Russo, S. E., Baker, P. J., Beckman, N. G., ... & Zavala, M. A. (2014). Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size. Nature, 507(7490), 90-93. doi:10.1038/nature12914
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  • 507
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  • 7490
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  • Our analyses were supported by theUnited States Geological Survey (USGS) John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis andSynthesis, the USGS Ecosystems and Climate and Land Use Change mission areas, theSmithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory—Center for Tropical Forest Science(CTFS), and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln Program of Excellence in PopulationBiology Postdoctoral Fellowship (to N.G.B.). In addition, X.W. was supported by NationalNatural Science Foundation of China (31370444) and State Key Laboratory of Forestand Soil Ecology (LFSE2013-11). Data collection was funded by a broad range oforganizations including the USGS, the CTFS, the US National Science Foundation, theAndrews LTER (NSF-LTER DEB-0823380), the US National Park Service, the US ForestService (USFS), the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, the John D. andCatherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MAGRAMA, theCouncil of Agriculture of Taiwan, the National Science Council of Taiwan, the NationalNatural Science Foundation of China, the Knowledge Innovation Program of theChinese Academy of Sciences, Landcare Research and the National Vegetation SurveyDatabase (NVS) of New Zealand, the French Fund for the Global Environment andFundación ProYungas. This paper is a contribution from the Western MountainInitiative, a USGS global change research project.
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