Mathematical Models in Plant Biology: An Overview

The study of plants could be undertaken at essentially every level of organization within biology, from that within a cell to the entire biosphere. To cover even the main theoretical questions on these diverse levels and the mathematical approaches used to analyse them would require several volumes. My objective here is to consider a small subset of the work that has been done, dealing only with the levels normally taken as being part of the purview of ecology and touching somewhat on a few more applied problems in agriculture. I will not discuss statistical analyses of plant community assemblages nor most aspects of plant-animal interactions, such as pollination biology (Real, 1983). Biophysical approaches were reviewed earlier (Gross, 1986b). Background references should be consulted for further details (e. g. France and Thornley, 1984; Givnish, 1986a; Gross and Miura, 1986; Jean, 1984; Rose and Charles-Edwards, 1981).