White Pine Girdling and Compression Experiment at Harvard Forest 2017-2019

Wood formation is a crucial process for carbon sequestration on land, yet how variations in phloem-transported carbon affect wood formation, respiration and nonstructural carbon pools remains poorly understood. To better understand the role of carbon supply on allocation to wood formation, we constrained phloem transport using girdling and compression around the stem of 40 mature white pines to monitor the effects of contrasting carbon supply (enriched above and reduced below the manipulations) on local wood formation and respiration, as well as on nonstructural carbon pools in needles, stems, and roots. This data set contains all data measured during the experiment. This includes wood anatomy, xylogenesis, stem respiration, nonstructural carbon measurements in coarse roots, stems and needles, as well as pre-dawn water potential measurements and pressure measurements from underneath the phloem compression collars. Furthermore, we provide allometric measurements for all trees. The code to process these data and reproduce our results is available in hf348-14-density-anomaly-analysis-code.zip. For more details pertaining to the methods see Rademacher et al. (in review).