Application of qualitative analysis techniques to the environmental modeling of plant species cultivation

The main issue discussed in the paper is the application of qualitative analysis techniques when
short data samples are available at the initial stage of experiments carried out to study behaviors of
agricultural plant species under different environmental conditions. The proposed techniques are
described on the examples of two tasks: analyze behaviors of chemical elements in plant species
irrigated with treated wastewater (on the example of Brocoli cabbage), as well as in plant species
cultivated near the highway (on the example of Lycopersicum species). The system of ecological
interactions is decomposed into individual subsystems with sufficiently small number of variables
describing concentrations of elements. The Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) is applied to
obtain the regressions between variables within subsystems. The Qualitative Description based on
signs combinations of differences for a regression function is employed to qualitatively analyze the
relationships among variables, both within individual subsystems and within the system in whole.
This approach makes it possible to identify main behavior features of individual objects/relationships
between objects, classify behaviors according to different criteria of similarity/distinction, provide
feature matching, etc. The obtained results then can be used to design the next-stage experiments
and construct more comprehensive models of plant species behaviors.