Abstract : Model plants are extensively used in biological studies, and their mechanical behaviour needs to be better understood, in relation to studies in mechanoperception for instance. We present here the first approach to derive experimentally the modal parameters of two of these plants, Arabidopsis thaliana and Populus tremula alba. A classical sinusoidal sweep excitation is used, with a measurement of displacements based on LKT optical flow tracking, followed by a Bi-Orthogonal decomposition (BOD). This allows to estimate several modal frequencies for each plant, as well as the corresponding spatial localizations of deformation. Analyzing the modal frequencies, we show that global and local modes correspond to distinct ranges of frequencies and depend differently on plant size. Possible phenotyping applications are then discussed.
