Spatial self-organization of vegetation in water-limited systems: mechanistic causes, empirical tests, and ecosystem-level consequences
Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: Self-organized spatial patterns of vegetation are frequent in water-limited regions and have been suggested as important ecosystem health indicators. However, the mechanisms underlying their formation remain unclear. It has been hypothesized that patterns could emerge from a water-mediated scale-dependent feedback (SDF), whereby interactions favoring plant growth dominate at short distances while growth-inhibitory interactions dominate in the long-range. As precipitation declines, this framework predicts a sequential change from gapped to labyrinthine to spotted spatial patterns. However, we know little about how net plant-to-plant interactions may shift from positive to negative as a function of inter-individual distance, and in the absence of strong empirical support, the relevance of SDF for vegetation pattern formation remains disputed. Alternative theories show that the same sequence of patterns could emerge when interactions between plants are always inhibitory if their intensity decays sharply enough with inter-individual distance. Although these alternative hypotheses lead to visually indistinguishable spatial distributions of plants, they predict different ecosystem-level consequences for the patterns, thus limiting their potential use as ecosystem-state indicators. Therefore, to make reliable ecological predictions, models need to accurately capture the mechanisms at play in the systems of interest. Here, we review existing theories for vegetation self-organization and their conflicting ecosystem-level predictions. We discuss ways to reconcile these predictions. We focus on the mechanistic differences among models, which can provide valuable information to help researchers decide which model to use for a particular system and/or whether it requires modification.
DOI: 10.13039/100006734
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: green
Funders: National Science Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Princeton University, Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Sächsisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research, Agencia Estatal de Investigación
Awards: G1175115578, G1496271574, G2148579211, G2262748287, G2373305540, G295657101, G300979063, Toward a mechanistic theory for biological patterns and their ecosystem management possibilities, G34346518, G3480869486, Collaborative Research: RoL: FELS: EAGER: Determining the Interplay of Long- and Short-Range Interactions in Emergent Biological Collective Behavior, G425668148, G476975023, G5080475149, G5335211246, Characterizing Ecological Transitions in Systems with Regularity, G7084143925, G7108507810, G8930391801, ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research: a regional center for theoretical physics
OpenAlex ID: W3123379641