The relationship between species richness and community biomass: the importance of environmental variables.

Several studies have used plant community biomass to predict species richness with varying success. In this study we examined the relationship between species richness and biomass for 36 marsh communities from two different watersheds. In addition, we measured several environmental variables and estimated the potential richness (the total number of species known to be able to occur in a community type) for each community. Above-ground living and dead biomass combined was found to be weakly correlated with species richness (R 2 = 0.02). Instead, a multiple regression model based on elevation (R 2 = 0.30) soil organic matter (R 2 = 0.18), and biomass was able to explain 82 % of the variance in species richness (...)

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