TY - JOUR
T1 - Evolutionarily stable strategy carbon allocation to foliage, wood, and fine roots in trees competing for light and nitrogen
T2 - An analytically tractable, individual-based model and quantitative comparisons to data
AU - Dybzinski, Ray
AU - Farrior, Caroline
AU - Wolf, Adam
AU - Reich, Peter B.
AU - Pacala, Stephen Wilson
PY - 2011/2
Y1 - 2011/2
N2 - We present a model that scales from the physiological and structural traits of individual trees competing for light and nitrogen across a gradient of soil nitrogen to their community-level consequences. The model predicts the most competitive (i.e., the evolutionarily stable strategy [ESS]) allocations to foliage, wood, and fine roots for canopy and understory stages of trees growing in oldgrowth forests. The ESS allocations, revealed as analytical functions of commonly measured physiological parameters, depend not on simple root-shoot relations but rather on diminishing returns of carbon investment that ensure any alternate strategy will underperform an ESS in monoculture because of the competitive environment that the ESS creates. As such, ESS allocations do not maximize nitrogen-limited growth rates in monoculture, highlighting the underappreciated idea that the most competitive strategy is not necessarily the "best," but rather that which creates conditions in which all others are "worse." Data from 152 stands support the model's surprising prediction that the dominant structural trade-off is between fine roots and wood, not foliage, suggesting the "root-shoot" trade-off is more precisely a "root-stem" trade-off for long-lived trees. Assuming other resources are abundant, the model predicts that forests are limited by both nitrogen and light, or nearly so.
AB - We present a model that scales from the physiological and structural traits of individual trees competing for light and nitrogen across a gradient of soil nitrogen to their community-level consequences. The model predicts the most competitive (i.e., the evolutionarily stable strategy [ESS]) allocations to foliage, wood, and fine roots for canopy and understory stages of trees growing in oldgrowth forests. The ESS allocations, revealed as analytical functions of commonly measured physiological parameters, depend not on simple root-shoot relations but rather on diminishing returns of carbon investment that ensure any alternate strategy will underperform an ESS in monoculture because of the competitive environment that the ESS creates. As such, ESS allocations do not maximize nitrogen-limited growth rates in monoculture, highlighting the underappreciated idea that the most competitive strategy is not necessarily the "best," but rather that which creates conditions in which all others are "worse." Data from 152 stands support the model's surprising prediction that the dominant structural trade-off is between fine roots and wood, not foliage, suggesting the "root-shoot" trade-off is more precisely a "root-stem" trade-off for long-lived trees. Assuming other resources are abundant, the model predicts that forests are limited by both nitrogen and light, or nearly so.
KW - FLUXNET
KW - Forest dynamics
KW - Height-structured competition
KW - Optimal
KW - Optimization
KW - Perfect plasticity approximation (PPA)
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79751521176&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1086/657992
DO - 10.1086/657992
M3 - Article
C2 - 21460552
AN - SCOPUS:79751521176
SN - 0003-0147
VL - 177
SP - 153
EP - 166
JO - American Naturalist
JF - American Naturalist
IS - 2
ER -