Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Research Visitors

• Farah Ben Naoum, from Sidi Bel Abbes University, Algeria, visited the team last spring for 1 month. She worked with C. Godin on combinatorial algorithms to compress trees.

• Risto Sievanen, from University of Helsinki, visisted the team for 3 months sabbatical leave in spring. He worked in particular with C. Pradal and C. Godin to integrate the model Lignum developed in his group within OpenAlea.

• Philip Benfey, from the University of Duke, USA, visited the group for 1 day at spring. Contacts have been established to exchange students/researchers between the labs for short periods. Julien Diener, working on automated methods for 2D root reconstruction from 2D images, should pay a visit to their lab in 2013.

• Xavier Sirault, from CSIRO and the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre in Canberra, Australia, visited the team during one day. It was decided during this visit to launch a project for coupling the phenotyping platform developed in Australia, a similar one developed in Montpellier by the group of F. Tardieu, and OpenAlea. The objective of this project will be to develop an integrated pipeline allowing the thorough analysis of a large number of genotypes, in particular assessment of growths of individual organs, of plant geometry, and of derived variables such as light interception. There is a strong complementarity between the three teams and the combination of expertise brought in the project by the different groups can result in a reference pipeline of model-assisted image analysis for plant phenotyping.