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Garden with Insight v1.0 Help: Browser pictures side with plant - biomass


When a plant or cultivar is selected in the browser, the pictures side of the browser is showing, and the display mode of biomass is selected, the browser displays a 3D drawing of the selected plant.

gif/00000174.gif
The browser pictures side showing a biomass breakdown between plant parts

In this display are all the separate parts of the simulated plant. For each type of plant part is listed how many items there are of that type in the plant, and either the total biomass for that type or the percentage of the total biomass for that type (click on the biomass or percent label in the lower left corner of the display to switch between biomass and percent). Some types of plant part that might be unfamiliar are:

gif/20000000.gif meristems: Meristems are the buds on the plant that produce new leaves, stems, and flowers. If there are meristems on a plant, they will produce internodes, leaves, and inflorescences if the plant gets larger.
gif/20000000.gif internodes: Internodes are sections of stem between (inter) the nodes of the stem, which are the places where the leaves come off the stem.
gif/20000000.gif seedling leaves: Seedling leaves, also called cotyledons, are leaves that are carried along in the seed in a dehydrated form, and that imbibe (draw in) water during germination, then unfold to form a seedling. The seedling leaves are responsible for the early photosynthesis that creates the first normal leaves. A monocotyledon like a corn plant has one (mono) seedling leaf. A dicotyledon like a tomato plant has two (di) seedling leaves.
gif/20000000.gif inflorescences: An inflorescence is a structure that holds a group of flowers. When you see a plant with several flowers at the end of a stem, that stem is usually an inflorescence. For example, tomato plants usually have several inflorescences, each of which has 4-7 flowers.
gif/20000000.gif unallocated vegetative, etc.: These four categories are shown here because of a method the plant simulation uses to allocate and remove plant biomass from the parts of the plant. When the simulation wants to add an amount of biomass to the plant because it grew, it needs to allocate that new biomass over all the plant parts (and there could be hundreds). Some of the plant parts cannot grow too quickly because it takes time to carry out certain growth functions; so there might be some biomass left over, unallocated, at the end of the day. This amount would be carried over to the next day and allocated then. It's fairly unlikely that there will ever be any biomass in any of these four categories, because if there is there is probably a problem with the simulation.

You can look at this display to see how a plant is doing, whether the plant is producing any flowers or fruits, and how much of the plant is alive. As you may have noticed, it's kind of hard to say whether a plant is alive or dead -- some leaves might be green and others might be brown, and sometimes a plant that looks like it's gone can have a little bit of green that can grow back. Portions of the plant biomass that are dead biomass are shown here in black, and live portions are in green. In a young plant there will typically be no black biomass at all, and sometimes when it gets cold the whole plant might die off very quickly from frost damage.

Some of these numbers might be strange or incorrect -- see the note on limitations in simulation. For information on how the plant parts are modeled, see the model documentation section on plant biomass allocation.

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Updated: May 4, 1998. Questions/comments on site to webmaster@kurtz-fernhout.com.
Copyright © 1998 Paul D. Fernhout & Cynthia F. Kurtz.