AMAPstudio: A software suite for plants architecture modelling

Abstract

AMAPstudio is a user-friendly software suite designed for botanists and agronomists to edit, visualize, explore and simulate multi-scale plant architecture. It contains interactive tools to handle the topology (e.g. organs addition or deletion), the geometry (e.g. 3D selection, edition, rotation) and the dynamics (i.e. time line, scenarios) of plants at the individual or scene scale. AMAPstudio is based on the Multi-scale Tree Graph (MTG) data structure, which is commonly used to represent plant topology. Users can explore this data structure to test or to improve hypotheses on plant development. Specific data can be extracted with combinations of criteria and can be visualized in tables and graphs. Simple analysis functions can be launched or data can be exported to external tools, e.g. R, or any other statistical computing environment, for more specific analyses. AMAPstudio is also a framework in which modellers can integrate their own plant simulation models. Different scenarios can be computed for a growth model by interactively modifying model parameters or plant structure (e.g. by pruning) at particular time steps.