Exploration of a plant architecture database with the AMAPmod software illustrated on an apple tree hybrid family

This paper describes the constitution and the statistical exploration of a plant architecture database using the AMAPmod system. In AMAPmod, plant arc hitectures are represented by a formal model, called MTG, which is the cent ral data structure of the system. A dedicated querying language AML enables the user to access plant architecture data with efficient built-in primiti ves. By combining these primitives, the user can extract various types of d ata that preserve a more or less important part of the structural informati on of the plant. Specific statistical tools have been designed to analyse d ata samples extracted from the plant architectures. Most of these tools, ra nging from (hidden) Markovian models to dynamic programming comparison tech niques, apply to samples of sequences. AMAPmod methodology is illustrated o n an actual-scale example concerning a hybrid family of apple trees. ((C) E lsevier, Paris.).