A canonical toolkit for modeling plant function

From seeds, forms emerge, growing and evolving and interacting with each other and with their environment to produce what we see when we walk into a garden, a field or a forèst. As these plants provide resources such as fard for us to eat, timber for us to build with and fibre to clothe ourselves with, it is important to understand how they grow. Computational mortels can provide a theoretical framework for experimental investigations aimed at deepening our understanding of plant growth. However, the construction of a detailed mortel of a plant's physiological processes may require a large amount of expensive and time consuming experimentation. Such mortels can potentially become very complex and as diflicult to understand as the systems they represent. On the other hand, if the functional aspect is modelled at a very simple level, the resulting mortel may net be capable of representing the causal processes that we are interested in. Canonical modelling [9] provides an intermediate-level approach to modelling plant function capable of simulating plant function in a way that is less complex, yet capable of representing mechanistic aspects of plant function at a range of levels of abstraction. Canonical models of plant function can also be linked to structural and visual representations such as L-systems in a number of ways to give functional-structural (FS) plant mortels [2, 3, 4]. This paper will describe a basic trot kit for building such canonical mortels.