20 April, 2019 (Dietze, ANN, NSC)

Dietze, M. C. (2014). Nonstructural Carbon in Woody Plants. Annual Review of Plant Biology, 65, 667–687.

NSC is important for tree plants because it acts as an physiological insurance budget for them. I expected that this paper would be organized as a chapter about NSC in a textbook and I can get basic knowledge about NSC. Although this paper is not organized as I expected, it provides well-summarized review about NSC related research results which contain interesting knowledge about NSC.

Among the results, it’s interesting that source and sink strengths influence NSC allocation and NPP/GPP balance. Also, it’s surprising that the amount of NSC spans to four times of foliage C at the forest-stand scale. This implies that when NSC related mechanisms are sufficiently understood to be included in ecosystem models, the effect at global scale can be enormous.

To realistically formulate NSC module, it would be essential to have sufficient amount of measurement with an unified methodology like flux tower measurement of EC method which forms a global network.