A Forest Growth Simulator Based on Functional-Structural Modelling of Individual Trees

The objective of this paper is to study forest growth simulation based on functional-structural modelling and its potentials for forestry applications. The GreenLab model is used for this purpose owing to its computational performances, its calibration capacity on real plants and its extension to the stand level, by taking into account the competition between neighbouring plants and the interactions with the environment. We first propose a software design: - to manage the composition of forest scenes, - to simulate their growth based on parallel computing of individual trees with the GreenLab model, - to get the realistic and real-time 3D rendering of the simulation results. We then detail a test case to illustrate the potentialities of this new tool. Mono-specific stands of poplars and pines are simulated. We analyze the computation performances and illustrate the simulation results with 3D outputs. A very classical application in forest management, stand thinning, is also tested. Our tool provides new insights thanks to the detailed architectures of trees resulting from the functional-structural model.