Variation of non‐structural carbohydrates across the fast‐slow continuum in Amazon forest canopy trees

1. Tropical tree species span a range of life-history strategies within a fast– slow continuum. The position of a species within this continuum is thought to reflect a negative relationship between growth and storage, with fast-growing species allocating more carbon to growth and slow-growing species investing more in storage. For tropical species, the relationship between storage and life-history strategies has been largely studied on seedlings and less so in adult trees. 2. We evaluated how stored non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) vary across adult trees spanning the fast– slow continuum in the Peruvian Amazon by: (a) analysing whole-tree NSC in two species of contrasting growth and (b) investigating the relationships with key life-history traits across a broader set of species. 3. Our results are consistent with a growth– storage trade-off. The analysis of whole-tree NSC revealed that the slow-growing Eschweilera coriacea stored about 2.7 times as much NSC as the fast-growing Bixa arborea due to markedly higher storage in woody stems and roots. B . arborea also had higher seasonality in NSC, reflecting its strong seasonality in stem growth. Across a range of species, stem starch was negatively related to species growth rate and positively related to wood density.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Functional Ecology

• Publication date

  2021-11-20

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/1365-2435.13971
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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