Abstract
Recent findings on non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) highlight their importance for plant growth and survival. Process-based biogeochemical models (BGC) focusing on primary production hardly capture the lagged NSC-related effects on tree mortality and growth. This study modified BIOME-BGC by adding sugar and starch NSC pools to incorporate NSCs as a temporary carbon reservoir between production and growth. The modified BGC-NSCs were evaluated with field NSC and flux sites across different biomes. As a result, the BGC-NSCs simulated the daily variations in gross primary production (GPP), the monthly and interannual variations of starch with a mean R2 of 0.60, 0.55 and 0.62, respectively. The simulation demonstrates that the starch pool size regulates the coupling strength between production and growth, implicating the involvement of NSCs in tree growth and mortality lagging. Consequently, we proposed future modeling guidance for mapping and simulating NSC dynamics to analyze growth and die-back process under climate change.
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