A Model Based on Cellular Automata for the Simulation of the Dynamics of Plant Populations

We present a Cellular Automata based model for the simulation of the dynamics of plant populations. The evolution of a plant population in a given area mainly depends on the resources available on the territory (in turn influenced by other factors like sunlight, rain, temperature, and so on) and how different individuals (plants) compete for them. Traditional methods used in this field are continuous and based on differential equations that model the global evolution of the system: unfortunately, most of the data needed to provide reliable parameters for these models are usually scarce and difficult to obtain. The model we present is instead thought in a bottom–up fashion, and is based on a two-dimensional Cellular Automaton, whose cells, arranged on a square grid, represent portions of a given territory. Some resources are present on the area, divided among the cells. A tree is represented in the model by a set of parameters, defining its species, its size (that is, the size of its parts such as limbs, trunk, and roots), the amount of resources it needs to survive, to grow, and/or reproduce itself (produce fruits). The model has been applied to the simulation of populations consisting of robiniae (black locust), oak, and pine trees, on the foothills of the italian alps, with encouraging results reproducing real experimentally observed population trends.