MOSCOW, May 26. /TASS/. Researchers from Siberian Federal University together with their counterparts from the United States have developed a way to recreate the growth process of tree rings on a digital platform that will make this method of assessing the impact of climate on plants more accessible to scientists, the press service of the university told TASS.
"A team of researchers from the University of Arizona (US), the University of Maryland (US) and Siberian Federal University interpreted the Vaganov-Shishkin mathematical model of growth of annual tree rings that is popular in the world scientific community, "transmitting" it to the Matlab platform, designed to solve a wide range of complex environmental tasks. The authors of the study are convinced that the model's new implementation in this language with the possibility of using the free Octave service will simplify its use in solving environmental problems associated with assessing the impact of global climate change on the growth of woody plants growing in the most diverse conditions of the northern and southern hemispheres of the Earth. It is important that the new code is now available for bachelor, master and graduate students," the university's press service told TASS.
The Vaganov-Shashkin mathematical model of the simulated growth of tree rings (named after the Krasnoyarsk scientists Evgeny Vaganov and Alexander Shashkin) allows to simulate the complex process of growth of tree rings depending on soil moisture, air temperature and daylight hours. It was originally written in the classic FORTRAN programming language. The use of the Matlab digital platform, which the authors compare with the transition from bicycle to motorcycle, will allow more researchers to independently conduct a systematic analysis of changes in the growth process of tree rings because the selected language code does not require special programming skills, and the model is intuitive in its nature, explain the developers.
"At present, Siberian Federal University scientists are in talks with their US colleagues on the joint work on introducing the developed code into the VS-GENN, an intelligent system for modeling annual growth of woody plants. This system is being developed at Siberian Federal University," the Siberian Federal University told TASS.
The study's results are published in the journal Dendrochronologia.