The Influence of Branch Order on Optimal Leaf Vein Geometries: Murray’s Law and Area Preserving Branching
Figure 1
Image series illustrating some of the steps involved in going from an image of a cleared leaf (left panel), to a binary representation (middle panel), to one in which vein orders have been assigned (right panel).
The central inset shows a vein bifurcation point; The radius of the parent branch (r0) and daughter branches (r1 and r2) at all branching points are determined, and used to determine cross sectional area (e.g. A = πr02), and to solve for α in the equation r0α=r1α + r2α (see Materials and Methods).