Allometric Growth Analysis in Clonal Patches

The differences in biomass allocation parameters among central, transition and marginal zones were analyzed by multiple comparison tests. Two-way ANOVA was used to examine the effects of clonal patch size and position within the patch on reproductive characteristics. For the ≤ 5m² patch size category, transition zone is not available, and its corresponding data were treated as missing values. The relationships between reproductive characteristics and patch area were analyzed with regression analysis, and the best fit model was selected. These data analyses were performed with SPSS 17.0 statistics software. The model Y = βX^α was used to analyze the reproductive allometric growth of a tiller. The equation was log transformed as follows: log₁₀{Y} = log₁₀{β} + α log₁₀{X}; where X was biomass of a reproductive tiller, spike biomass or reproductive tiller biomass, and Y was spike biomass, biomass of mature seeds or mature seed biomass, α was the scaling slope and β was the allometric intercept. Slopes and intercepts were determined with Standardized Major Axis (SMA) regression using the SMATR software. Firstly, the slopes were tested to to determine whether they differedfrom 1. The difference in allometric slopes among treatments was tested [7 (link)].