Carbon budgeting belowground

Abstract

In the economic analogy, plants have a carbon 'budget'part of which must be allocated to the root system to capture essential water and nutrients. If the root system can be built and run 'cheaply' then the plant might reinvest the savings in capturing more resources or yielding more harvestable biomass. The challenge is in connecting the architecture and physiology of the root system to the use of that carbon budget; that is, finding the 'trade-offs' between root traits where the capture and use of resources is optimized. In the recently published article in New Phytologist, Guo et al. (2021; doi: 10.1111/ nph.17329) present a phenotyping methodology that does just that, combining root architecture and root respiration to assess the 'economics' of root system development.