© Institute of Chartered Foresters, 2009. All rights reserved. Forestry, Vol. 82, No. 4, 2009. doi:10.1093/forestry/cpp019 For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org Advance Access publication date 7 July 2009 Introduction In recent decades, the sustainable management of forest ecosystems has become a central issue of policy and hence of interest in the research com- munity (Kimmins, 1974; Toman and Ashton, 1995; Fox, 2000; Hunter and Schuck, 2002). Among the many topics related to the sustainable Estimation of nutrient content of woody plants using allometric relationships: quantifying the difference between concentration values from the literature and actuals LAURENT AUGUSTO 1 *, MARK R. BAKKER 2 , CHRISTINE DE LAVAISSIÈRE 1 , LIONEL JORDAN-MEILLE 2 and ETIENNE SAUR 2 1 INRA, UMR 1220 TCEM, F-33883 Villenave d’Ornon, France 2 ENITA de Bordeaux, UMR 1220 TCEM, F-33883 Villenave d’Ornon, France *Corresponding author. E-mail: laugusto@bordeaux.inra.fr Summary The objective of this study was to evaluate the reliability of allometric methods for assessing biomass and nutrient contents of woody species at the stand scale. Allometric relationships were built from 13 stands of a woody species of moderate height (European gorse: Ulex europaeus L.). In eight other stands, the above-ground biomass of the species was estimated using allometric relationships. Total nutrient contents (N, P, K, Ca, Mg) of these eight stands were also computed either with nutrient concentrations obtained from local stratified samples or with values derived from the literature. The estimated above-ground biomass was consistent with the measured values obtained by complete harvest of the stand. The nutrient contents calculated using the local samples were also in agreement with measured values. Conversely, the use of nutrient concentrations values derived from the literature led to significant errors which were up to 104 per cent in the estimation of nutrient contents. We conclude that allometric methods can give reliable and accurate estimates of above-ground biomass and nutrient content of woody species, provided that the values for nutrient concentrations are obtained from local samples and not from average values found in the literature. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/forestry/article/82/4/463/550997 by guest on 11 July 2022