Recently, it was revealed by Anhui Agricultural University that Associate Professor Huang Xingzhao's team from the College of Forestry and Landscape Architecture, in collaboration with domestic and international experts, has uncovered the impact of tree phylogeny on biomass. The findings of this research were recently published in "Plant Diversity".
The dynamic changes in forest biomass serve as crucial indicators reflecting the influence of natural environments, global climates, and human activities on forests. It also forms an important data foundation for assessing forest productivity and carbon storage capacity. Over the past few decades, estimating forest biomass has been a hot topic in the field of forestry.
The allometric biomass model has become a commonly used method for estimating forest biomass due to its excellent fitting effect, high estimation accuracy, wide applicability, and practicality. However, traditional model fitting methods have certain limitations, such as being restricted by research locations and species, and requiring a significant investment of manpower, material resources, and time. Currently, there are approximately 61,000 tree species globally, but less than 10% of them have had their allometric biomass model parameters estimated.
Huang Xingzhao explained, "Previous studies mainly focused on the influence of the environment on tree traits, while neglecting the role of tree phylogeny. However, closely related plants actually exhibit more similarity in traits (such as tree height)."
In earlier research, Huang Xingzhao's team approached from the perspective of tree phylogeny and constructed a comprehensive global dataset of parameters for allometric biomass models, including 894 models from 302 relevant articles, encompassing a total of 276 tree species. The research results enhanced the understanding of the relationship between tree phylogeny and biomass.
In this latest work, Huang Xingzhao led his team to further investigate the independent variable in the allometric biomass model besides tree height and diameter at breast height—wood density. They established a comprehensive global dataset, which included 27,297 wood density measurements from 2,621 tree species, exploring the biogeographical and phylogenetic patterns of wood density.
The results showed that wood density has significant phylogenetic relationships on a global scale, confirming the importance of tree phylogeny in driving changes in wood density among tree species. The study also found that, in the global variation of wood density, the influence of tree phylogeny exceeds that of current environmental factors.
Huang Xingzhao noted that the above research, by exploring from the perspective of tree phylogeny, has enhanced the understanding of the relationship between species and the environment. The research results not only expand our understanding of the universality of allometric growth relationships in terrestrial ecosystems or global ecosystems but also provide important theoretical foundations and data support for estimating global forest biomass and carbon reserves.
Related paper information: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pld.2024.04.002
