Length and biomass data for Atlantic and Pacific seaweeds from both hemispheres

Abstract

As the length of an organism is a unidimensional measure but its biomass is distributed across three dimensions, length and biomass are allometrically related in plants and animals. Due to the high interspecific morphological variation in nature (e.g., long, thin, and narrow flatworms vs. short and globose snails), the biomass–length relationship differs among species. Interest in the principles governing biomass–length allometry has sparked research about the drivers of biological form (West et al., 1999; Niklas and Enquist, 2001; Makarieva et al., 2005; Kleyer et al., 2019). Biomass–length allometry can ultimately be of practical value, such as for the non-destructive estimation of stand biomass (Scrosati, 2006a; Yuen et al., 2016) and productivity (Martin et al., 2014), the determination of body condition (Brodeur et al., 2020), or the unintrusive estimation of body mass (Turnbull et al., 2014; Coulis and Joly, 2017; Sohlström et al., 2018), which is in turn allometrically related to various biological processes (Brown et al., 2004; Marquet et al., 2005).