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Journal of Plant Ecology Advance Access published online on April 9, 2008
Journal of Plant Ecology, doi:10.1093/jpe/rtn008
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Botanical Society of China. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Modeling the growth of individuals in crowded plant populations

Christian Damgaard1,* and Jacob Weiner2

1 Department of Terrestrial Ecology, National Environmental Research Institute, University of Aarhus, DK-8600 Silkeborg, Denmark
2 Department of Ecology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Denmark and National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, CA 93101-5504, USA

* Correspondence address. Tel: +45-89201400; Fax: +45-89201414; cfd{at}dmu.dk

Aims: We present an improved model for the growth of individuals in plant populations experiencing competition.

Methods: Individuals grow sigmoidally according to the Birch model, which is similar to the more commonly used Richards model, but has the advantage that initial plant growth is always exponential. The individual plant growth models are coupled so that there is a maximum total biomass for the population. The effects of size-asymmetric competition are modeled with a parameter that reflects the size advantage that larger individual have over smaller individuals. We fit the model to data on individual growth in crowded populations of Chenopodium album.

Important Findings: When individual plant growth curves were not coupled, there was a negative or no correlation between initial growth rate and final size, suggesting that competitive interactions were more important in determining final plant size than were plants’ initial growth rates. The coupled growth equations fit the data better than individual, uncoupled growth models, even though the number of estimated parameters in the coupled competitive growth model was far fewer, indicating the importance of modeling competition and the degree of size-asymmetric growth explicitly. A quantitative understanding of stand development in terms of the growth of individuals, as altered by competition, is within reach.

Keywords: Birch model • growth curves • plant competition • Richards model • size-asymmetric competition


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