Growth Relationships and their Biometric Formulation

Abstract

In forest ecosystems, biological variability makes it difficult to reveal strict functional laws as in physics or mathematics. We must be content with stochastic relationships, which we call biological relationships or rules. The growth relationships at the individual-tree and stand level, and the biological variability of these relationships, are of particular interest in forest growth and yield science. This chapter introduces a number of established growth relationships, and shows how to separate deterministic components from stochastic components of growth, which is important when simulating the growth behaviour of biological systems in models.