\u201cIt remains to be determined if redwood\u2019s old reserves and ancient cell lines are an exception in the plant kingdom or an exceptional example of an insurance strategy common to long-lived plants,\u201d said George Koch<\/strong>, professor in Ecoss and co-author on the study.<\/p>\n Plants store carbon, and many do it for some length of time. Most models looking at these reserves, however, look at a storage period no longer than a year. For a two-millennia-old tree, that doesn\u2019t work. This study modeled how long such reserves could be saved for future use. The researchers inhibited photosynthesis to keep out new carbon and used radiocarbon dating to infer how old the carbon being put to use was. The models suggested that in a few trees, carbon reserves were likely decades\u2014maybe even a century\u2014old.<\/p>\n The team\u2019s updated models showed that the redwoods\u2019 reserves included carbon captured 50 to 100 years ago. \u201cAs far as we know, these are some of the oldest carbon reserves ever measured,\u201d said Drew Peltier<\/strong>, assistant research professor in SICCS and lead author on the study. \u201cSugars photosynthesized perhaps 100 years ago were used to grow new leaves in 2021. Although coast redwood is clearly a superlative species, it is likely that other long-lived trees also harbor carbon reserves that are much older than previously recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis study was really exciting for us because we used measurements at the atomic level\u2014 counting the amount of carbon-14 relative to carbon-12\u2014to understand what these sprouts, which start as tiny green shoots, are telling us about the growth strategy of these\u00a0enormous trees, among the largest living organisms on earth,\u201d said Regents\u2019 professor Andrew Richardson<\/strong>, a co-author on the paper.<\/p>\n![\"Drew](\"http:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wordpresst\/uploads\/sites\/153\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Peltier.jpg\")