Allometric regression equations to determine aerial biomasses of Mediterranean shrubs

One of the difficult problems arising in many ecological models of development of plant communities and populations is how to estimate the aerial biomass in a non destructive way. This paper presents a nondestructive estimation of the aboveground biomass of plants of several species of Mediterranean shrubs. The method used combines the length-based measurements of a number of plants of each of several taxon with measured biomasses of those same plants fitting allometric nonlinear regression equations to yield parameterized models of plant biomass as a function of plant apparent volume. Two methods of estimating the apparent volume are developed and compared with a well known one in literature.