Understanding the roles of nonstructural carbohydrates in forest trees – from what we can measure to what we want to know

Summary Carbohydrates provide the building blocks for plant structures as well as versatile resources for metabolic processes. The nonstructural carbohydrates ( NSC ), mainly sugars and starch, fulfil distinct functional roles, including transport, energy metabolism and osmoregulation, and provide substrates for the synthesis of defence compounds or exchange with symbionts involved in nutrient acquisition or defence. At the whole‐plant level, NSC storage buffers the asynchrony of supply and demand on diel, seasonal or decadal temporal scales and across plant organs. Despite its central role in plant function and in stand‐level carbon cycling, our understanding of storage dynamics, its controls and response to…

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  Max-Planck-Gesellschaft