Old reserves and ancient buds fuel regrowth of coast redwood after catastrophic fire.

For long-lived organisms, investment in insurance strategies such as reserve energy storage can enable resilience to resource deficits, stress or catastrophic disturbance. Recent fire in California damaged coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) groves, consuming all foliage on some of the tallest and oldest trees on Earth. Burned trees recovered through resprouting from roots, trunk and branches, necessarily supported by nonstructural carbon reserves.

Carbon starvation following a decade of experimental drought consumes old reserves in Pinus edulis.

Shifts in the age or turnover time of non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) may underlie changes in tree growth under long-term increases in drought stress associated with climate change. But NSC responses to drought are challenging to quantify, due in part to large NSC stores in trees and subsequently long response times of NSC to climate variation. We measured NSC age (Δ C) along with a suite of ecophysiological metrics in Pinus edulis trees experiencing either extreme short-term drought (-90% ambient precipitation plot, 2020-2021) or a decade of severe drought (-45% plot, 2010-2021).

An incubation method to determine the age of available nonstructural carbon in woody plant tissues.

Radiocarbon (∆14C) measurements of nonstructural carbon enable inference on the age and turnover time of stored photosynthate (e.g., sugars, starch), of which the largest pool in trees resides in the main bole.