Perennial crops differ distinctively from annuals, in terms of long juvenile life , perennial nature of woody framework , vegetative -to-reproductive phase , senescence/rest period for induction of flowering etc. It is the most ominous problem to work out the nutrient requirement based on nutrient uptake pattern . Many researchers don't put much significance to nutrient uptake , they are more concerned with the nutrient removal pattern by the edible portion of the crop or the amount of nutrients that goes out of the system . Nutrient uptake may not throw that decisive impact on scaling the magnitude of response of improved plant nutrition as a result of fertilization. It is said , it is the amount of nutrients that still remain in various parts ( Perennial framework ) of the plant. But , in either of the case , is there any technique to work out the nutrient uptake pattern of the crop , without uprooting the whole plant ( Non-destructively ).This will surely add a new dimension in defining the fertilizer requirement of the perennial crops.
most of our work on nutrient uptake in fruit trees is concerned with nutrient concentration and accumulation in leaves and fruit during the growing season, which provide some information on the nutritive status of trees.However, it is possible to use radioactive tracers such as P32, especially with young trees growing in pots, to study the pattern uptake.
There are two distinct aspects of your response , one , is it the nutrient uptake , which I suppose is not the nutrient uptake , it is just the partitioning of applied nutrient across different plant parts , governed predominantly by the source-sink relationship . Second very interesting issue , you have raised the use radio-tracer technique , which is now considered almost out-fashioned since such studies are by and large undertaken under pots with largely controlled conditions, besides many other reasons. I was more willing to see the responses on some kind of modelling to compute the nutrient uptake so that off-site movement of those applied nutrients can be quantified. And some kind of monitoring tools can be provided to put check on menacing nutrient mining wherever perennial crops are grown .
The quest for a practical method for the direct estimation of nutrient uptake is elusive indeed. Have you looked for an answer by studying ratios of plant nutrients in leafs?
For inspiration you may read our paper on comparison of N and P uptake in mangrove trees in eutrophicated ("fertilized") versus natural environments.
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Infact , I was looking at having at having some kind of methodology or even model through which we can calculate the nutrient uptake which take into consideration , both the concentration of nutrients and biomass production as well on whole tree basis. Will it be advisable to compute nutrient uptake based on fruit yield ? . Here , we have yield as biomass and concentration of nutrients on whole fruit basis , to multiply them to get the uptake . Probably , this portion of nutrients tagged through fruits , is still all the more important since this is the amount of the nutrients thrown out of the system through fruits. Nutrients tagged with other plant parts , however, remain within the premise of tree architecture , called perennial framework.
Though respondents to this question have been very limited , but with available discussion , it makes abudantly clear that computing nutrient uptake by conventional means is not at all possibles , unless trees are uprooted or alternatively radio-isotopic means are used. to define the partitioning of applied nutrients
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