PlantGro can provide estimates of plant and tree growth under a wide range of conditions by evaluating responses to some 20 environmental variables ranging from day length to soil pH and determining the limiting factor. Although intended only to indicate the suitability of a given site-species combination, empirical trials suggest that the suitability index provides a reasonable indication of growth potential, offering correlations with height growth as high as 80%. PlantGro can be calibrated for new situations by providing appropriate soil, climate and species files. These can be compiled from plot-based data, casual observations, or expert knowledge.

Recent developments with PlantGro include a new user-friendly windows-based interface, enhanced reporting capacity including the ability to export output files in excel format for easy manipulation and a powerful batch mode facility that permits the user to query multiple plants against chosen soil and climate conditions.

PlantGro is also fully SimCLIM compatible. SimCLIM is a climate change scenario generation tool and in combination with PlantGro permits the user to modify climate files to reflect a range of future climate scenarios based on the latest International Panel on Climate Change science. PlantGro therefore offers an effective way to provide initial growth estimates for taxon-site combinations not covered by plot data or other models and with the additional capacity for considering the impacts of future climate change.

To read more about PlantGro, download the manual  (PDF 2.38MB)

For a free evaluation version of PlantGro, send a request to info@climsystems.com

Contact Peter Urich at s CLIMsystem Ltd for more details