Impacts of global environmental change drivers on non‐structural carbohydrates in terrestrial plants

Abstract

Non‐structural carbohydrates (NSCs, including soluble sugars and starch) are essential to support the growth and survival of terrestrial plants. Starch and sugars play different roles in multiple plant ecological functions such as drought tolerance, growth and plant defence, and several other processes which are being rapidly shaped by global environmental change. However, it is uncertain whether soluble sugars and starch show different responses across plant functional types, tissue types and treatment conditions (i.e. the intensity and duration of environmental variability) to global‐change drivers. Here based on a database of 275 plants (including 17 plant functional types), we conducted a meta‐analysis to examine the effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration (eCO2), nitrogen (N) addition, drought and warming on NSCs and its components. We found NSCs responses to global environmental change were mainly driven by (a) soluble sugar changes in response to N addition and drought, as well as (b) starch changes in response to eCO2 and warming. The different responses between soluble sugars and starch were more evident under eCO2 and drought, especially in herbs or leaves. Interactive effects of multiple environmental change drivers on soluble sugars and starch were mainly additive. The divergent main and interactive effects on soluble sugars and starch depend on experimental conditions. For example, the starch responses to eCO2 and its interaction with N addition were the strongest in short‐term experiments. Overall, our study shows the divergent responses of soluble sugars and starch in terrestrial plants to different global environmental change drivers, suggesting a changed carbon sink–source balance in plants under future global changes. The findings also highlight that predicting plant functional changes into the future requires a mechanistic understanding of how NSCs and its components are linked to specific environmental change drivers. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Variations in Rainfall Affect the Responses of Foliar Chemical Properties of Cunninghamia lanceolata Seedlings to Soil Warming

“…Previous studies have reported that the value of δ 13 C showed a more consistent seasonal signal for climate change across sites than ring width (Maxwell et al, 2020). In addition, non-structural carbohydrate is the most important mobile C pool and the material basis for growth and metabolism in organisms; they mainly include soluble sugar and starch (Du et al, 2020;Herrera-Ramirez et al, 2020). In well-irrigated conditions, Panicum maximum has been reported to maintain stoichiometric homeostasis in a warming climate, and this was related to the distribution of sugars among different organs (Viciedo et al, 2019).…”

Carbon concentration in the world's trees across climatic gradients

“…Though the extent of inter and intraspecific variation in wood C concentrations is now better understood, studies evaluating the adaptive significance of this trait, and many wood chemical traits other than nonstructural carbohydrate concentrations (Du et al, 2020), remain scarce. A handful of studies have explored wood C concentrations in relation to WDan important ecological and life-history trait among trees (Chave et al, 2009;Kraft et al, 2010;D ıaz et al, 2016) with recent meta-analyses indicating a statistically significant, negative wood C concentration-WD relationship across a dataset of 470 angiosperm and conifer species Ó 2021 The Authors New Phytologist Ó 2021 New Phytologist Foundation New Phytologist (2021) 232: 123-133 123 www.newphytologist.com (Martin et al, 2018).…”

Research challenges and opportunities for using big data in global change biology

“…The analyses on root traits also have emphasized the important role of mycorrhizal pathways in regulating ecosystem functions under environmental changes (Ma et al., 2018; Soudzilovskaia et al., 2015). Overall, the data mining on species‐level observations has facilitated the process‐understanding of biological responses to global changes, such as plant non‐structural carbohydrates (Adams et al., 2017; Du, Lu, & Xia, 2020), leaf photosynthetic capacity (Kattge, Knorr, Raddatz, & Wirth, 2009) and respiration (Atkin et al., 2015), plant biomass (Xia & Wan, 2008; Xu, Lu, et al, 2019b), and soil microbial community composition (De Vries et al., 2012).…”