Allocation of forest biomass across broad precipitation gradients in China’s forests

Forests act as major sinks for atmospheric CO(2). An understanding of the relationship between forest biomass allocation and precipitation gradients is needed to estimate the impacts of changes in precipitation on carbon stores. Biomass patterns depend on tree size or age, making it unclear whether biomass allocation is limited by tree age at regional scales. Using a dataset of ten typical forest types spanning a large age scale, we evaluated forest biomass allocation–precipitation correlations with the aim of testing whether biomass allocation patterns vary systematically in response to altered precipitation. With increasing mean annual precipitation, a significant quadratic increase occurred in ≤30 yr and >60 yr groups in stem biomass, >60 yr group in branch biomass, and >60 yr groups in leaf biomass; and a significant cubic increase occurred in 30–60 yr and all age forest groups in stem biomass, ≤30 yr, 30–60 yr and all age forest groups in branch biomass, ≤30 yr and all age forest groups in leaf biomass, and in each group in root biomass, indicating that organ biomass is strongly limited by precipitation. Thus, forest biomass responds predictably to changes in mean annual precipitation. The results suggest that forest organ biomass–precipitation relationships hold across independent datasets that encompass a broad climatic range and forest age.