Modeling plant growth offers interesting opportunities for environmental science.

Since its positioning, GreenLab benefits from both structural and crop model applications.

For agriculture, it seeks to provide geneticists with new parameters in order to characterize more precisely the functioning of crops and direct breeding.

The same set of parameters, used in the dynamic equations of the model, can be to brought into play to :

• predict crop production under different environmental conditions (temperature, light)
• predict crop production at different densities
• analyse individual variability inside a crop (related for instance to seed weight variations and stochastic structural aspects)
• optimize crop management sequences (irrigation, treatments, etc.).

In the longer term, in landscaping and urban planning, such approaches could design libraries of structural functional plants.
Thus, environmental conditions, retrieved from geographic information systems (GIS), climatic conditions, site positions and orientation will be used to generate 3D plant representations reflecting local conditions.
"Virtual landscapes" created by image synthesis will then turn into "functional landscapes" open to different environmental and climate scenarios.