Principles of Relative Growth Analysis

Abstract

The analysis of plant growth is an important interdisciplinary field of plant science and lays the foundation of individual-based research in forest ecology and management. In the past, knowledge about growth processes was a crucial pre-requisite for sustainable economic planning in forestry, in this day and age, global environmental changes render growth analysis more important than ever. Marks in point process statistics (Chap. 4) can also represent growth rates for a better characterisation of tree-size dynamics and are dependent variables in individual-based modelling (Sect. 5.2). Particularly the concept of relative growth has proved to be useful in comparative studies of plant growth analysis and for growth reconstruction in dendrochronology, climate change and forest decline research. Studying relative growth rates has become a standard in plant science and is key to the concept of allometry. Relative growth rates are crucial characteristics for assessing growth performance and growth efficiency. The concept of relative growth has independently been developed and pursued in different fields of science and at different locations. In this chapter, we integrated different approaches in one consistent theoretical concept and provided many examples.