Fig. 1.

Conceptual framework linking growth rate to plant size and traits. (A) Shows how the distribution of mass in a typical plant varies with size. (B) Equations describing the rates of biomass growth, and growth in various dimensions of the plant. In the first line the symbol $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ means “sum” across tissues, where $i=\mathrm{l},\mathrm{b},\mathrm{s},\mathrm{r}$. Gray numbers indicate equation numbers referred to in the main text. Insets show how the different metrics change intrinsically with plant height, when applying the “functional-balance” model in Table 4. Colors highlight where the same metric appears repeatedly in different equations. For a list of variable names, see Table 3.