Theory

the model, from the ground up

What plant actually solves, and why. Consolidates material currently scattered across papers and vignettes.

Core

The demographic and physiological machinery shared by every strategy.

New here? Start with the two orientation pages, then dive into the details.

• The big picture — the mental model in plain language, no equations. Start here.
• The maths, gently — the core equations built up one step at a time.
• The maths, worked through — the same equations pushed through one small numerical example, bridging the primer and the full PDE.
• The size-structured PDE — demography of individuals, patches, and metacommunities.
• Assimilation & hydraulics — the leaf-level carbon and water economy.
• Soil water & root uptake — where transpired water comes from: the multi-layer soil balance and the root-collar solve that feeds it to the leaf model.
• Adaptive dynamics — invasion fitness and evolutionary endpoints.

Models

The physiological strategies that plug into that machinery — each a concrete set of growth, fecundity, and mortality functions. See the models overview.

• FF16 — the trait-based functional-balance model.
• K93 — Kohyama’s basal-area competition model.
• TF24 — the hydraulically-coupled leaf model, plus its TF24f acclimation-lag variant.

Implementation

How the equations are solved numerically. See the implementation overview.

• The characteristic method
• ODE stepping & control
• The node-spacing algorithm
• Canopy & light-environment models