Abstract

Because plant growth is very limited or some species are rare, rai>id and non-destructive methods are needed to assess productivity of herbaceous plants in arid ecosystems. As an alternative to destructive methods, dimensional analysis has proven to be a useful tool to estimate aboveground-dry biomass of plants in these systems. Here, we provide information on the relationships between size and biomass of some herbaceous species of the Chilean arid region. The multiplicative model accounted for the size-biomass relationships in most of the species studied.