Résumé
Root branching of oil palm seedlings was modelled by a 2-state first order Markov chain (discrete time, discrete state space stochastic process). The radicle of the seedling was considered as a main axis which ramified. An elementary length unit was defined as the smallest length between 2 successive lateral roots. The model was based on the analysis of a sequence of events, each event being indexed by the rank of the elementary length unit on the main axis. An event was defined as the state of the length unit, i.e. branched or unbranched. The state of a length unit depended only on the state of the previous length unit. The Markov chain is homogeneous i.e. the transition probabilities do not depend on the rank of the elementary length unit.