Sphere Packing

What do the structure of tropical forests and the packing of apples in a box have in common? A team of Formind developers has now established a new model which can be used to explain the tree size distribution in natural forests. Main idea of this new approach is to pack tree crowns. Trees (cylinder as stem and sphere as crown) have been randomly placed in a finite space.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1513417112