Modeling the Growth of Inflorescence

In many herbaceous plants with inflorescence, the axillary flowering branches remain in a substantial dormant stage between their initiation and the start of expansion. The durations of dormant stage, called growth delay, are linked to the positions of branches in plant architecture. For modeling biomass production and partitioning, it is essential to describe the growth delay to obtain the number of organs in expansion competing for the assimilates. In this paper, position-dependent delay functions are proposed for herbaceous plants with different branching inflorescence. The delay intensities can change according to branch position or plant dynamic source-sink ratio, to simulate the apical dominance phenomena in plants with basipetal flowering sequences. Simulation results are given on the effect of delay parameters on plant architecture. By integrating the delay functions with GreenLab model, the growth process of chrysanthemum under two light levels were simulated. The current work provides a generic module for modeling the growth of individual organs in plants with inflorescence.