The Xplo project has been developed in UMR AMAP since 2008 aiming at edition, visualization, exploration and simulation of plant architecture in a user-friendly manner. The software provides interactive tools to handle the plant structure topology (i.e. organ addition/ deletion), geometry (i.e. 3D selection, edition, rotation) and dynamics (i.e. time line, scenarios). It has been used for various types of plant architecture studies.

Xplo is fully compatible with the multi-scale tree graphs (MTGs) data structure, which is commonly used to represent plant topology. Users can explore this data structure to find or to improve hypotheses on plant development. Specific data can be extracted with combination of criteria and be visualised in tables and graphs. Simple analysis functions can be launched or data can be exported to external tools, i.e. AMAPmod, R or any other statistical computing environment, for more specific analyses.

Once their own plant simulation model designed, modellers can integrate it in co-development with an AMAP developer into Xplo and get benefit of its features to test their hypotheses. Different scenarios can be computed for a growth model by interactively modifying model parameters or the plant structure (e.g. by pruning) at different time steps.

A plant geometry builder is integrated in Xplo. It allows a 3D plant mockup to be computed according to geometrical data available in the tree graph. If geometrical information are missing, standard default algorithms are provided to compute the missing data and to make 3D rendering available.

Xplo is an extensible software built according to the flexible Capsis methodology. Besides its plant architecture editor, independent simulation models can be integrated in Xplo under the form of separated modules, and various tools can be plugged at any time using flexible extensions.

This software can be run either in an interactive context with a multi-language graphical user interface or in script mode (Groovy/Java). Xplo core is a free open-source software (LGPL) and it is available under Windows, Linux and MacOSX.