Matt Hobbs, matthobbs.com

In the Arizona Daily Star, SFI External Professor Brian Enquist describes recent work to discover what mathematical rules govern the size, shape, and other features of trees and plants. 

His work, published in a series of recent papers, has allowed Enquist and his collaborators to make accurate predictions about how much carbon dioxide forests assimilate, how much carbon they store, and how much water and nutrients they use, for example. These insights are useful for understanding important concepts in global climate change, as well as assisting in agriculture, conservation, and restoration," according to the article.

Enquist, a professor with the University of Arizona's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, often works with SFI External Professor Jim Brown (University of New Mexico) and SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West on research that seeks the underlying patterns associated with metabolic scaling that governs how fast something grows, how long it lives, and how it uses nutrients.

For trees, Enquist and his team have discovered a branch hierarchy rule that drives how branch radius and length change from the base of the tree to the tips of its branches and create a repeating and regular pattern of branching.

Read the Arizona Daily Star article (April 4, 2011)