Understory plants are important components of forest ecosystem productivity and diversity. Compared to biomass models of overstory canopy trees, few are available for understory saplings and shrubs and therefore their roles in estimation of forest carbon pools are often ignored. In this study, we harvested 24 understory species including 4 saplings, 9 tree-like shrubs and 11 typical shrubs in c...

Biomass partitioning is important for illustrating terrestrial ecosystem carbon flux. West, Brown and Enquist (WBE) model predicts that an optimal 3/4 allometric scaling of leaf mass and total biomass of individual plants will be applied in diverse communities. However, amount of scientific evidence suggests an involvement of some biological and environmental factors in interpreting the variati...

Both active and passive forest restoration schemes are used in degraded landscapes across the world to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. Restoration is increasingly also being implemented in biodiversity offset schemes as compensation for loss of natural habitat to anthropogenic development. This has raised concerns about the value of replacing old-growth forest with plantat...

The long-term and large-scale dynamics of ecosystems are in large part determined by the performances of individual plants in competition with one another for light, water, and nutrients. Woody biomass, a pool of carbon (C) larger than 50 % of atmospheric CO2, exists because of height-structured competition for light. However, most of the current Earth system models that predict climate change ...

It is important to improve the accuracy of models estimating aboveground biomass (AGB) in large areas with complex geography and high forest heterogeneity. In this study, k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), gradient boosting machine (GBM), random (RF), quantile (QRF), regularized (RRF), Bayesian regularization neural network (BRNN) learning algorithms were constructed estimate AGB four types based on e...

Changes in woodland characteristics induced by plants and soil greatly affect hydrological processes. Stable isotope technology indoor moisture characteristic experiments were conducted at three rainfall levels (3.6, 23.5, 49.8 mm) to investigate the processes under six woodlands (two pure forests four mixed forests). The main influencing factors contributing these changes identified a low moun...

Leaf caloric value (LCV) reflects the capacity of a leaf to fix and accumulate solar energy through photosynthesis. We systematically investigated the LCV of 745 plant species in 9 forests, representing a range of tropical to cold-temperate forests along the 4700-km North-South Transect of Eastern China. The goals were to explore the latitudinal patterns of LCV at the levels of species, plant f...

Alien invasive species can affect large areas, often with wide-ranging impacts on ecosystem structure, function, and services. Prunus serotina is a widespread invader of European temperate forests, where it tends to form homogeneous stands and limits recruitment of indigenous trees. We hypotesized that invasion by P. serotina would be reflected in the nutrient contents of the native species' le...