The objective of this paper is to investigate the structure of a gener
al subcritical branching measure-valued process X subject to the usual
regularity conditions. We prove that, if the second moments of the to
tal mass X(t)(E) are finite, then X is a superprocess and we give an e
xplicit expression of the branching characteristics Q and l in terms o
f the continuous martingale component of the total mass X(t)(E) and th
e Levy measure (jumps compensator) of X.