Data from: Biomass–density relationships of plant communities deviate from the self‐thinning rule due to age structure and abiotic stress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A pertinent debate in plant ecology centers around the generality of the self-thinning rule. However, studies focused on highly simplified settings such as even-aged monospecific populations or optimal conditions. This neglects the fact that most natural communities, to which the classical self-thinning slope is often applied, are age-structured, composed of multiple species and exposed to various types of abiotic stress. With the help of an individual-based model, we relax these simplified assumptions and systematically test for changes in the biomass–density relationships of uneven-aged, functionally diverse plant communities across a complete stress gradient, using excessive to insufficient soil water as a case study. We show that frequent recruitment, which resulted in an uneven-aged community, and stress intensity caused predictable changes in the entire biomass–density trajectory. Increasing stress resulted in steeper (more negative) slopes and increased the intercept in the classical self-thinning section irrespective of excessive or insufficient soil water as a stress type. Recruitment steepened the slope, too and enabled a novel section in the biomass–density trajectory. This novel section represented a quasi-steady state of the density-dependent dynamics of new generations which occurred locally within patches of recruitment. At the community level, the slope of the biomass–density relationship at quasi-steady state had a significantly flatter slope of −1.1 under optimal soil water conditions. Functional diversity showed little impact on density-dependent mortality. Namely, it resulted in an earlier onset of mortality but not in changes in the values of the slope and intercept. We conclude that the classical −3/2 slope is not useful to describe the biomass–density relationship in natural and semi-natural plant communities. The magnitude and direction of variation in the slope are related to the age–structure and abiotic stress intensity in the plant community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".