XVI International Botanical Congess

The original definition of L-systems treated plants as closed cybernetic systems. Consequently, plant development was simulated without taking into account the environment. Environmentally sensitive L-systems and open L-systems, introduced recently, eliminate this simplifying assumption. Thus, L-systems can be applied to simulations that involve both transfer of information within the plants (endogenous interactions) and interactions between plants and plant components mediated by their environment(exogenous interactions). Examples range from the modeling of phenotypic plasticity of individual plants, viewed as populations of modules competing for and sharing resources, to individual-based ecological models that operate on hundreds of thousands of plants.