A distance measure between plant architectures

Abstract

In many biological fields (e.g. horticulture, forestry, botany), a need exists to quantify different types of variability within a set of plants. In this paper, we propose a method to compare plant individuals based on a detailed comparison of their architectures. The core of the method relies on an adaptation of an algorithm for comparing rooted tree graphs, recently proposed by Zhang in theoretical computer science. Using this algorithm a distance between two plants is defined as the cost of transforming one into the other (using basic 'edit operations'). We illustrate this method in three application fields and then compare it with other methods for quantifying plant similarity.