| Summary: | The practical problem of studying the nutritional status of trees under field conditions has given rise to the present research, which examines some aspects of the use of chemical composition of plants as an index of their nutritional status The need for a comprehensive investigation on this subject with tree crops, was felt by the author during his studies on rubber plant, Hovea brasilionsis, a tree crop of considerable economic importance in Malaya where expensive fertilizer practices are followed to maintain and improve the plantations Availability of spectrochemical methods for the analysis of plant materials has made such an investigation possible at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research, where, for practical reasons, the work was carried out using three species of deciduous trees that are commonly found in Scotland. The conclusions drawn from this investigation are often general in nature and are considered likely to prove useful in understanding similar problems of tree crops under widely varying conditions. The work embodied in this thesis is presented in eight chapters. Chapter 1 indicates the relation of the present investigation to the published work on this subject. Chapter 2 describes the experimental methods and the materials used. Chapter 3 consists of a short discussion on the reported accuracy and reproducibility of the several spectrochemical methods of analyses that were used throughout this investigation. Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 present all results of the investigation. Finally, in Chapter 8, all observations are considered together, and their implications on both theoretical and practical aspects of tissue analysis, and the indicated lines of further work, are briefly discussed.
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