BAAD: a Biomass And Allometry Database for woody plants
Quantifying the amount of mass or energy invested in plant tissues is of fundamental interest across a range of disciplines, including ecology, forestry, ecosystem science, and climate change science (Niklas, 1994; Chave et al. 2005; Falster et al. 2011). The allocation of net primary production into different plant components is an important process affecting the lifetime of carbon in ecosystems, and resource use and productivity by plants (Cannell & Dewar, 1994; Litton et al. 2007; Poorter et al. 2012). While many studies in have destructively harvested woody plants in the name of science, most of these data have only been made available in the form of summary tables or figures included in publications. Until now, the raw data has resided piecemeal on the hard drives of individual scientists spread around the world. Several studies have gathered together the fitted (allometric) equations for separate datasets (Ter-Mikaelian & Korzukhin, 1997; Jenkins et al. 2003; Zianis et al. 2005; Henry et al. 2013), but none have previously attempted to organize and share the raw individual plant data underpinning these equations on a large scale. Gathered together, such data would represent an important resource for the community, meeting a widely recognised need for rich, open data resources to solve ecological problems (Costello et al. 2013; Fady et al. 2014; Harfoot & Roberts, 2014; Costello et al. 2013). We (D.S. Falster and R.A. Duursma, with the help of D.R. Barneche, R.G. FitzJohn and A. Vårhammar) set out to create such a resource, by asking authors directly whether they would be willing to make their raw data files freely available. The response was overwhelming: nearly everyone we contacted was interested to contribute their raw data. Moreover, we were invited to incorporate another compilation led by M. Ishihara and focussing on Japanese literature. As a result, we present BAAD: a Biomass And Allometry Database for woody plants, comprising data collected in 174 different published and unpublished studies.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 1191796
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-103891; KP1702010
- Journal Information:
- Ecology, 96(5):1445-1446, Journal Name: Ecology, 96(5):1445-1446
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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