Digiplante : Mathematical Modelling of Plant Growth

In the late 90’s, the emergence of the functional-structural plant models (FSPM) offer a framework for the integration of existing biological knowledge on interactions between plant structure and biophysical functioning, henceforth seen as the key to understand plant growth. In FSPMs, plants appear as typical complex systems : multi-scale issues, multiple and interacting biophysical processes, regulation and retroaction loops, that raise mathematical issues.

The Digiplante team was born in this context around Philippe de Reffye  as a joint team between INRIA, CIRAD and Centrale in 2002. The main objective of Digiplante was the development of the GreenLab FSPM (Ph. de Reffye), its mathematical formalism and the fitting of real plant data to study the genericity and applicability of the model. The concepts implemented in the GreenLab model were shown to be suitable for a wide variety of plants, as diverse as Arabidopsis or Beech tree.

Arabidopsis thaliana, coll. A. Christophe, LEPSE.

Beechtree (Fagus sylvatica), coll. T. Constant, LerFob.

        
To make models proper for real applications, it is necessary to better account for the interactions with the environment and to provide measure and control of model uncertainty. Full evaluation of the models requires studies of their robustness and of their predictive capacity. Since 2011, Digiplante is a team Centrale-INRIA and its objectives are declined around three axes:

• Model Design and Analysis
• Model Evaluation from Experimental Data and Model Selection
• Methods for the Applications : Prevision, Control and Genetic Improvement