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Allometry (Ancient Greek ἄλλος állos "other", μέτρον métron "measurement") is the study of the relationship of body size to shape, [1] anatomy, physiology and behaviour, [2] first outlined by Otto Snell in 1892, [3] by D'Arcy Thompson in 1917 in On Growth and Form [4] and by Julian Huxley in 1932.
Allometry studies the relative size of organs or parts of organisms. Tree allometry narrows the definition to applications involving measurements of the growth or size of trees. Allometric relationships often are used to estimate difficult tree measurements, such as volume, from an easily measured attribute such as diameter at breast height (DBH).
Allometric engineering is the process of experimentally shifting the scaling relationships, for body size or shape, in a population of organisms. More specifically, the process of experimentally breaking the tight covariance evident among component traits of a complex phenotype by altering the variance of one trait relative to another.
Kleiber's law, like many other biological allometric laws, is a consequence of the physics and/or geometry of circulatory systems in biology. [5] Max Kleiber first discovered the law when analyzing a large number of independent studies on respiration within individual species. [2]
In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a relative change in the other quantity proportional to the change raised to a constant exponent: one quantity varies as a power of another. The change is independent of the initial size of those quantities.
The principle relies on the allometric (non-linear) scaling of size and energy requirement. The metabolic rate per unit of body mass of large animals is slow enough to subside on a consistent flow of low-quality food. [1] However, in small animals, the rate is higher and they cannot draw sufficient energy from low-quality food to live on. [1]
Brain–body mass relationship for mammals [dubious – discuss]. Brain–body mass ratio, also known as the brain–body weight ratio, is the ratio of brain mass to body mass, which is hypothesized to be a rough estimate of the intelligence of an animal, although fairly inaccurate in many cases.
DBH is used in estimating the amount of timber volume in a single tree or stand of trees utilising the allometric correlation between stem diameter, tree height and timber volume. [8] It can also be used in the estimation of the age of veteran trees, given that diameter increment is the only "constant non-reversible feature of tree growth". [9]