Ecology and Prediction of Compensatory Growth: From Theory to Application in Forestry

Compensatory growth has been observed in forests, and it also appears as a common phenomenon in biology. Though it sometimes takes different names, the essential meanings are the same, describing the accelerated growth of organisms when recovering from a period of unfavorable conditions such as tissue damage at the individual level and partial mortality at the population level. Diverse patterns of compensatory growth have been reported in the literature, ranging from under-, to compensation-induced-equality, and to over-compensation. In this review and synthesis, we provide examples of analogous compensatory growth from different fields, clarify different meanings of it, summarize its current understanding and modeling efforts, and argue that it is possible to develop a state-dependent model under the conceptual framework of compensatory growth, aimed at explaining and predicting diverse observations according to different disturbances and environmental conditions. When properly applied, compensatory growth can benefit different industries and human society in various forms.