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Despite the wide variation in the structural characteristics in natural forests, tree size distribution show fundamental similarities that suggest general underlying principles. The metabolic ecology theory predicts the number of individual scales as the −2 power of tree diameter. The demographic equilibrium theory predicts tree size distribution starting from the relationship of size distributions with growth and mortality at demographic equilibrium. Several analytic predictions for tree size distributions are derived from the demographic equilibrium theory, based on different growth and mortality functions. In addition, some purely phenomenological functions, such as polynomial function, have been used to describe the tree size distributions. In this paper, we use the metabolic ecology theory, the demographic equilibrium theory and the polynomial function to predict the tree size distribution for both the whole community and each species in an old-growth temperate forest in northeastern China. The results show that metabolic ecology theory predictions for the scaling of tree abundance with diameter were unequivocally rejected in the studied forest. Although these predictions of demographic theory are the best models for most of the species in the temperate forest, the best models for some species ( Tilia amurensis, Quercus mongolica and Fraxinus mandshurica) are compound curves (i.e. rotated sigmoid curves), best predicted by the polynomial function. Hence, the size distributions of natural forests were unlikely to be invariant and the predictive ability of general models was limited. As a result, developing a more sophisticated theory to predict tree size distributions remains a complex, yet tantalizing, challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poplar is one of the most economically important and intensively studied tree species owing to its wide application in the timber industry and as a model material for the study of woody plants. The natural resource of poplars in China is replete. Over the past 10 years, the application of molecular biological techniques to genetic improvements in poplar species has been widely studied in China. Recent advances in molecular genetic improvements of poplar, including cDNA library construction, gene cloning and identification, genetic engineering, gene expression, genetic linkage map construction, mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTL) and molecular-assisted selection, are reviewed in the present paper. In addition, the application of modern biotechnology to molecular improvements in the genetic traits of the poplar and some unsolved problems are discussed. (Managing editor: Li-Hui Zhao) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]