ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Using wavelength and slope to infer the historical origin of semiarid vegetation bands.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Wavelength Selection for Periodic Travelling Waves: An Unsolved Problem.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Nonreciprocal feedback induces migrating oblique and horizontal banded vegetation patterns in hyperarid landscapes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Conservative or dissipative? Two distinct processes for spatial pattern emergence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Phase-separation physics underlies new theory for the resilience of patchy ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- High-integrity human intervention in ecosystems: Tracking self-organization modes.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- A Comparison of the "Reduced Losses" and "Increased Production" Models for Mussel Bed Dynamics.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- Growth, death, and resource competition in sessile organisms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Spatially localized structures in the Gray-Scott model.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2018Article
- Multistability of model and real dryland ecosystems through spatial self-organization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Signatures of human impact on self-organized vegetation in the Horn of Africa.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- When does colonisation of a semi-arid hillslope generate vegetation patterns?Journal of mathematical biology · 2016Article
- Assessing the robustness of spatial pattern sequences in a dryland vegetation model.Proceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2016Article
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Abstract
Landscape-scale patterns of vegetation occur worldwide at interfaces between semiarid and arid climates. They are important as potential indicators of climate change and imminent regime shifts and are widely thought to arise from positive feedback between vegetation and infiltration of rainwater. On gentle slopes the typical pattern form is bands (stripes), oriented parallel to the contours, and their wavelength is probably the most accessible statistic for vegetation patterns. Recent field studies have found an inverse correlation between pattern wavelength and slope, in apparent contradiction with the predictions of mathematical models. Here I show that this "contradiction" is based on a flawed approach to calculating the wavelength in models. When pattern generation is considered in detail, the theory is fully consistent with empirical results. For realistic parameters, degradation of uniform vegetation generates patterns whose wavelength increases with slope, whereas colonization of bare ground gives the opposite trend. Therefore, the empirical finding of an inverse relationship can be used, in conjunction with climate records, to infer the historical origin of the patterns. Specifically, for the African Sahel my results suggest that banded vegetation originated by the colonization of bare ground during circa 1760-1790 or since circa 1850.
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