How to get representations of real plants in computers for exploring their botanical organisation

Abstract : The diversity of plants we investigate has led us to develop a formal and unified model for the representation of real plants. This model aims at being independent of a given plant family but it also attempts to be sufficiently flexible to be adapted to a particular plant description. It can thus be considered as a formal tool to get an exact copy of a plant and its structure, at different levels of organization, into a computer. Further processing tools have been developed to extract different types of data from the plant, to explore and model them. The paper sketches out the model and its associated coding language. Applications to fruit-trees illustrate a few aspects of the method.