Abstract
Arising from: P. B. Reich, M. G. Tjoelker, J.-L. Machado & J. Oleksyn Nature 439, 457–461 (2006)10.1038/nature04282; Reich et al. reply, Hedin reply
Reich et al.1 report that the whole-plant respiration rate, R, in seedlings scales linearly with plant mass, M, so that 
when θ ≈ 1, in which cR is the scaling normalization and θ is the scaling exponent. They also state that because nitrogen concentration (N) is correlated with cR, variation in N is a better predictor of R than M would be. Reich et al. and Hedin2 incorrectly claim that these “universal” findings question the central tenet of metabolic scaling theory, which they interpret as predicting θ = ¾, irrespective of the size of the plant. Here we show that these conclusions misrepresent metabolic scaling theory and that their results are actually consistent with this theory.
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Change history
09 March 2007
Reference numbers changed from original document. * Trend in legend for figure 2 is G → 0, not G → 1 as originally published.
References
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Enquist, B., Allen, A., Brown, J. et al. Does the exception prove the rule?. Nature 445, E9–E10 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05548
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05548
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