Modelling coupled plant axial growth with carbon and water flow
(2025)
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- Abstract
- Plants are central to life on Earth, making up 80% of global biomass and driving major carbon and water cycles between soil and atmosphere. With a growing global population, 80% of the increased food demand by 2050 must be met by plants. Understanding how plants allocate carbon and water during growth is therefore both a scientific and agricultural priority. This thesis focuses on modeling the coupled flow of carbon and water in growing plants, with particular attention to the feedback between conduit resistance and axial growth rate. Traditional models often treat these flows separately or assume static plant structures. In contrast, this work presents a mechanistic functional–structural plant model (FSPM) that integrates water transport, carbon allocation, and dynamic plant growth. The main contributions are: The development of a modular FSPM that links plant structure with internal water and carbon flows. The validation of phloem pressure–flow relationships using data from existing literature. The identification of a quantitative relationship between phloem hydraulic resistance and growth rate. These findings offer new insights into how internal resource dynamics regulate plant growth, with implications for agronomy, ecology, and plant science.
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Citations
Zhou, X. (2025). Modelling coupled plant axial growth with carbon and water flow. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274632