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The rules of leaf-stem coordination across the world's plants
Document de travail

The rules of leaf-stem coordination across the world's plants

Alex Fajardo, Mark Olson, Patrick Heuret, Susanne Vetter, Aleca Borsuk, Gonzalo Camps, Michael Gundale, Christopher Lusk, Kangmin Ngo, Yusuke Onoda, …
28/04/2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9306653/v1

Résumé

Leaf stem
Leaves and stems span an extraordinary range of sizes and forms, yet how this diversity is coordinated in whole plants remains unclear, lacking both general theory and empirical tests across the full diversity of plant lineages. Here, we derive predictions from Metabolic Scaling Theory (MST)1 and test them using a globally standardized dataset spanning 1,473 species and nearly all woody plant families worldwide. Across lineages, climates, and growth forms, we show that twig cross-sectional area scales isometrically with leaf area (slope = 1), while leaf size scales to the 1/3 power with twig length, and to the -4/3 power with stem tissue density, all in conformity with predictions from MST. Plant height influences the intercepts, but not the slopes, of leaf-stem scaling relationships, indicating that twigs from taller plants have narrower twigs for a given leaf area, consistent with selection maintaining constant sapwood volume per unit leaf area. Our findings provide empirical support for an adaptive spectrum of leaf–stem coordination in plants, shaped by major tradeoffs and selection pressures, including plant height, that govern plant carbon allocation globally.

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