How to compute light environment with CohortTop about plant

[richfitz]

My belief is that when we have only cohorts, this should become a sum over cohorts. For a list of cohorts we should be able to approximate this with a trapezium rule over vectors x, y where

x[i] = cohort[i].mass_leaf
y[i] = cohort[i].leaf_area_above(z)

where cohort[i].leaf_area_above(z) incorporates the total leaf mass and density of cohort i. Presumably the density incorporates a term that cancels out the integration over mass_leaf?

This is implemented in 9773484 at the moment.

[richfitz]

If we do compute light environment the way described above, there is a possible problem on the first step where there is exactly one cohort tracked with a mass the same as the initial seed mass -- in that case x_1 == x_0 (so dx = 0) and the integral will evaluate to zero everywhere, so even though there is an "individual", the light environment is empty. This goes away as the individual grows, but I'm not sure that it goes away correctly.

[dfalster]

Is this still an issue?

[richfitz]

I don't think so; it looks like this is probably correct now.