1.2 LONG-TERM STORAGE

There is no single clear definition of “long-term” for sugar beet post-harvest storage given in the literature. As such, a broad definition of long-term is here given as storage with physiological stability, where physiological stability is “a dynamic state of a living organism characterized by the maintenance of one or more physiological parameters within value ranges that vary only slightly in the presence of disruptive elements” (Lebel et al., 2014). For the conditions in which post-harvest storage is employed for the sugar beet crop, long-term storage is taken as that which extends more than two weeks beyond the harvest date. Two weeks is an estimate of the average length of the initial period of wound healing and elevated rates of respiration resulting from the harvest process. It also fits with the definition of greater than 15 days, given in a presentation in 2012 by European leaders in research into sugar beet root storage (Legrand et al., 2012). It should also be noted that the processes occurring during the implied short-term are still of significance to this thesis. In particular, exposure and reaction to extreme weather.