Л. Г. Раменский и аллометрия растений (история и современное состояние проблемы)

Abstract

A historical review of the new direction of botanical science, namely, «plant allometry» was made. In this review, the attention is focused only on establishing the dependence of the aboveground mass of plants on their size. The first foreign experiments on the indirect determination of the aboveground mass of herbs, semishrub, and low shrub date back to the 1930s. Now the determination of the aboveground mass of these plants based on the re-sults of measuring their habitus has become widespread. In addition to height and cover, the volume of plants began to be used as predictors of aboveground biomass. Since the second half of the last century, power (expo-nential) equations have been used to estimate the aboveground mass of plants in hayfields and pastures from the results of measuring their habitus. By now, the "allometry of plants" has gone far beyond the limits, which reflect only the regularities connecting the sizes of plants with each other, as well as their size and productivity of plants. L. G. Ramensky began to conduct his experiments on the indirect determination of the aboveground mass of plants in hayfields and pastures much earlier than foreign researchers did. In 1915, he proposed the notion of "projective weight". This is the mass of plants per unit area of its cover. At first L. G. Ramensky assumed to calculate this value proceeding from the projective cover of plants. However, soon he became convinced that such a calculation gives a very unstable result. In 1938, L. G. Ramensky proposed to take into account the height of plants to determine the projective weight. He also proposed multiple linear regression equations to predict projective weight depending on the height of vegetative shoots and the ratio of the number of flower shoots to the cover of the plant. In the early 1950s, L. G. Ramensky summarized the accumulated material regarding the de-termination of the weight of the aboveground mass of individual plants by the parameters of their habitus. How-ever, this generalization was published only in 1966, 13 years after the death of L. G. Ramensky. Together with his colleagues, he calculated a special coefficient for many plants, reflecting the degree of dependence of the projective weight on the morphological, anatomical features of the species, as well as the conditions of their growth. Estimation of the aboveground mass of herbaceous plants, semishrub and low shrub based on the results of measuring their habitus that was started by Ramensky at the beginning of the last century, has outgrown the utilitarian need to determine feed reserves in hayfields and pastures. This assessment entered the framework of an independent direction of botanical science, which is currently called «plant allometry».