Abstract:
Fractal analysis has been applied to describe various aspects
connected with the complexity of plant morphology. In this work we
determined the fractal dimension of leaves from three species of Solanaceae
in order to characterize the structure/architecture of the these leaves.
Samples for every species (pepper, tomato and eggplants) have been
collected from the greenhouse of the University of Agricultural Sciences and
Veterinary Medicine from Iasi. The leaves were pressed, scanned and
processed with the Corel Photo-Paint 1 in order to use the HarFA soft to
determine the fractal dimension. Our results showed that the fractal
dimension of these vegetable leaves increases from pepper to tomato. But the
fractal dimension is a fractional quantity and it is a direct measure of the
relative degree of complexity of the leave. Tomato leaves have multiple
sinuses and we suggested that this complexity is related to the necessity of
light penetration through the plant. The eggplant leaves have a medium
fractal dimension between pepper and tomatoes. This means that this
structure assure eggplant needs of light and temperature. From this it follows
that tomatoes need a higher complexity to develop by comparison with the
other studied species
