A Stochastic Language for Plant Topology

The article describes a stochastic formal language adapted to the botanical concepts underlying the GreenLab organogenesis model. It is based on stochastic L-systems (parallel rewriting grammars) and on multi-type branch- ing processes: stochastic processes control bud productions and at each growth cycle, each new growth unit is the result of a random variable. This formalism allows determining inductively the generating functions of the resulting plant structures and of the numbers of organs, which fully char- acterizes the plant development resulting from the elemen- tary stochastic processes of bud productions. The moments of the stochastic distributions of the numbers of organs are also explicitly deduced.