A recent study published in PNAS by SFI External Professors Van Savage and Brian Enquist and their collaborators offers a new model of the form and function of the internal vascular network that delivers water from trunk to leaves in plants.
Their work helps elucidate evolutionary principles for plants that guide the form, function, and dynamics of resource distribution and transport networks. SFI researchers Geoffrey West, James Brown, and Enquist have found remarkable fundamental processes across many systems and scales -- from animals to energy technologies to cities and companies -- that seem to arise from the form and limits of such distribution and supply networks.
The findings of the new model do a better job than previous models of matching empirical data for scaling relationships in a variety of trees -- including maple, oak, and pine -- which all exhibit important functional differences based on their anatomy.
Building on the previous SFI work, the new study also sheds light on the importance of space filling -- networks expand to fill all available space to deliver resources -- by extending this principle from internal vascular anatomy to tree canopies to whole forests, possibly making this a ubiquitous principle in plant biology.
Read the PNAS paper (December 13, 2010)
Read the University of Arizona news release (February 21, 2011)