It's only natural: Plant respiration in unmanaged systems

Respiration plays a key role in the terrestrial carbon cycle and is a fundamental metabolic process in all plant tissues and cells. We review respiration from the perspective of plants that grow in their natural habitat and how it is influenced by wide-ranging elements at different scales, from metabolic substrate availability to shifts in climate. Decades of field-based measurements have honed our understanding of the biological and environmental controls on leaf, root, stem, and whole-organism respiration. Despite this effort, there remain gaps in our knowledge within and across species and ecosystems, especially in more challenging-to-measure tissues like roots. Recent databases of respiration rates and associated leaf traits from species representing diverse biomes, plant functional types, and regional climates have allowed for a wider-lens view at modeling this important CO2 flux. We also re-analyze published data sets to show that maximum leaf respiration rates (Rmax) in species f..., These data are a reanalysis of data originally published in O'Sullivan et. (2017). Respiration temperature response curves were collected on a large number of species. This dataset includes the maximum respiration values extracted from these respiration temperature response curves, whereas O'Sullivan et al. (2017) published the maximum temperature of respiration. Full data collection methods for the respiration temperature response curves are available in O'Sullivan et al. (2017). Full data analysis methods for the extraction of maximum respiration are available in Schmiege et al. (2023). Full references for both these publications are available in the README file associated with this dataset., The datafile is a .csv file that can be opened in most programs and/or software including Microsoft Excel, R and Python.