ALLOMETRIC REGRESSION EQUATIONS TO DETERMINE AERIAL BIOMASSES OF MEDITERRANEAN SHRUBS

One of the difficult problems arising in many ecological models of dev elopment of plant communities and populations is how to estimate the a erial biomass in a non destructive way. This paper presents a nondestr uctive estimation of the aboveground biomass of plants of several spec ies of Mediterranean shrubs. The method used combines the length-based measurements of a number of plants of each of several taxon with meas ured biomasses of those same plants fitting allometric nonlinear regre ssion equations to yield parameterized models of plant biomass as a fu nction of plant apparent volume. Two methods of estimating the apparen t volume are developed and compared with a well known one in literatur e.