Economic strategies of plant absorptive roots vary with root diameter

Plant roots typically vary along a dominant ecological axis, the root economics spectrum, depicting a tradeoff between resource acquisition and conservation. For absorptive roots, which are mainly responsible for resource acquisition, we hypothesized that root economic strategies differ with increasing root diameter. To test this hypothesis, we used seven plant species (a fern, a conifer, and five angiosperms from south China) for which we separated absorptive roots into two categories: thin roots (thickness of root cortex plus epidermis