Trees face the dilemma that achieving high plant productivity is accompanied by a risk of drought-induced hydraulic failure due to a trade-off in the trees' vascular system between hydraulic efficiency and safety. By investigating the xylem anatomy of branches and coarse roots, and measuring branch axial hydraulic conductivity and vulnerability to cavitation in 4-year-old field-grown aspen plan...

background  short stature is a manifestation of a wide variety of conditions that some of which may be amenable to timely treatment and a suboptimal growth rate may be an early marker pointing to the cause of growth retardation. this study was conducted to evaluate the diagnostic utility of growth rate in differential diagnosis of children with short stature. materials and methods all children ...

in order to estimate responses of growth rate and growth hormone of clarias gariepinus to stocking density, fish (initial weight 30.71 ± 0.89 g) were stocked in 120-l tanks at densities of 35, 65, 95, and 125 kg/m3 for 60 days. on day 30 and 60, the fish growth rates were measured, pituitary growth hormone (gh) mrna levels and serum gh concentrations were examined by real-time qpcr and elisa te...

Heat dissipation from organic matter decomposition is a well-recognized proxy for microbial activity in soils, but only few modeling studies have used heat signals to quantify traits such as maximum substrate uptake rate, specific growth mortality and efficiency. In this contribution, hierarchy of coupled mass-energy balance models proposed estimate encoded model parameters using respiration da...

Mosses are an understudied group of plants that can potentially confirm or expand principles of plant function described for tracheophytes, from which they diverge strongly in structure. We quantified 35 physiological and morphological traits from cell-, leaf- and canopy-level, for 10 ground-, trunk- and branch-dwelling Hawaiian species. We hypothesized that trait values would reflect the disti...

A life-table response experiment was performed to investigate the effects of sediment-bound cadmium on individual life-history traits and feeding rates of four clones of Potamopyrgus antipodarum. Demographic effects were evaluated using a simple two-stage model to estimate population growth rate (lambda). Decomposition analysis was performed to investigate the contributions of each of the affec...