A distance measure between plant architectures

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