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2. Titles This is a presentation by Roderick Hunt, Ric Colasanti & Andrew Askew University of Sheffield It is all about SAM Amodel involving self-assembling modular plants

3. Community image This is what a community of virtualplants looks like Contrasting tones show patches of resource depletion

4. CSR type, frame 1 This is a single propagule of a virtual plant It is about to grow in a resource-rich above- and below-ground environment

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23. ditto f. 20 The plant has produced abundant growth above- and below-ground and zones of resource depletion have appeared

24. Binary tree diagram Above-ground binary tree ( = shoot system) Each plant is structured like this A branching module Above-ground array Above-ground binary tree base module Below-ground array Below-ground binary tree base module This is only a diagram, not a painting ! An end module Below-ground binary tree ( = root system)

25. Explanation The end-modules capture resources: Light and carbon dioxide from above-ground Water and nutrients from below-ground The branching (parent) modules can pass resources to any adjoining modules In this way whole plants can grow

26. Explanation The virtual plants interact with their environment (and with their neighbours) just like real ones do They possess most of the properties of real individuals and populations For example …

27. S-shaped growth curves S-shaped growth curves

28. Older plant, low nutrient Partitioning towards the resource-poorer half of the environment

29. Allometric coefficients Maintaining a functional equilibrium above-and below-ground

30. Older plant, asymmetric nutrients Foraging towards resources in a heterogeneous environment

31. Dense population And when many plants are grown together in a dense population …

32. Self-thinning … they exhibit self-thinning but as the plants are 2-dimensional the thinning slope is not –3/2

33. Explanation All of these plants have the same specification (modular rulebase) But this specification can easily be changed if we want the plants to behave differently…

34. Explanation For example, we can recreate J P Grime’s system of C-S-R plant functional types For this, the specifications we need to change are those controlling morphology, physiology and reproductive behaviour …

35. Modular rulebase

36. Explanation With three levels possible in each of three traits, 27 simple functional types could be constructed However, we model only 7 types; the other 20 include Darwinian Demons that do not respect evolutionary tradeoffs

37. Explanation Let us see some competition between different types of plant Initially we will use only two types …

38. R-CSR-R, frame 1 Small size, rapid growth and fast reproduction Medium size, moderately fast in growth and reproduction

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