Brian J. Enquist

TL;DR: An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Abstract: Abstract A key challenge in ecology is to understand the relationships between organismal traits and ecosystem processes. Here, with a novel dataset of leaf length and width for 10 480 woody dicots in China and 2374 in North America, we show that the variation in community mean leaf size is highly correlated with the variation in climate and ecosystem primary productivity, independent of plant life form. These relationships likely reflect how natural selection modifies leaf size across varying climates in conjunction with how climate influences canopy total leaf area. We find that the leaf size‒primary productivity functions based on the Chinese dataset can predict productivity in North America and vice‐versa. In addition to advancing understanding of the relationship between a climate‐driven trait and ecosystem functioning, our findings suggest that leaf size can also be a promising tool in palaeoecology for scaling from fossil leaves to palaeo‐primary productivity of woody ecosystems.

TL;DR: It is shown that DSAH contains serious technical, theoretical and conceptual errors, including misrepresentations of published data and of the authors' previous work, and that, within experimental error, there is no empirical evidence for an increase in b during aerobic activity as suggested by the proposed model.

TL;DR: Coomes et al. as mentioned in this paper examined the scaling of xylem dimensions in 10 species of oaks (Quercus spp.) and showed that the scaling model of the plant scaling model was correct.

TL;DR: This work classifies diverse branching networks-mouse lung, human head and torso, angiosperm plants, and gymnosperm plants-by harnessing recent advances in medical imaging, algorithms and software for extracting vascular data, theory for resource-distribution networks, and machine-learning.