Modeling the spatial distribution of plants on the row for wheat crops: Consequences on the green fraction at the canopy level

•A pipeline was developed to measure at the emergence stage the coordinates of plants on the row from RGB imagery.•Plant spacing along the row is independent and follows a gamma distribution.•The deviation of plants from the row direction follows a Gaussian distribution with a strong dependency on the position along the row.•Impacts of the sowing pattern on the canopy structure were assessed using the 3D Adel-Wheat model.