XVI International Botanical Congess

The 3-D models that treat plants as consisting of basic units which correspond to their functional parts set requirements on the submodel for metabolism. The metabolism must be described consistently with the degree of structural detail. There exist a large number of models for metabolic functions (e.g., photosynthesis) and their driving forces (e.g., radiation). Their application in virtual plant models is fairly straightforward. However, there are only a small number of models for the distribution of metabolic products and growth that could be applied in a straightforward way. We explore the problem of presenting the distribution of growth in a model more closely and present ways to deal with it in the context of 3-D plant models. The ways to deal with distribution of growth range from using allometric relationships to solving transport of several substrates in a 3-D plant architecture. We illustrate our presentation with examples from model Lignum.