Seminar: Boaz Hilmann

Freshly fixed sugars can flow into roots within days, but non-structural carbon (NSC) pools, including sugars, starch, and lipids, can contain decades-old C. Is the old NSC metabolically relevant? Do different NSCs have different turnover rates? And what can the age of NSC tell us about C allocation? In my talk, I will try to answer these questions by using 14C measurements in temperate and alpine treeline forests. I will show that old NSC can be used in apparently unstressed trees (especially for fine roots growth), that spruce and beech differ in their NSC dynamics and in the 14C ages of individual NSCs, and that a stronger allocation of fresh sugars to the belowground is imprinted in 14C ages.