Biophysical dependences among functional wood traits

1. Wood properties and especially wood density have been used as functional traits organized along major axes of species life history and strategy. Beyond statistical analyses, a better mechanistic understanding of relationships among wood traits is essential for ecologically relevant interpretation of wood trait variations. 2. A set of theoretical relationships mechanistically linking wood basic density with some other wood traits is derived from cellular material physics. These theoretical models picture basic physical constraints and thus provide null-hypotheses for further ecological studies. Analysis is applied to data from two original datasets and several datasets extracted from literature. 3. Results emphasize the strong physical constraint behind the link between basic density and maximal storable water on the one hand, and elastic modulus on the other hand. Beyond these basic physical constraints, the developed framework reveals physically less expected trends: the amount of f...