ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Discovery of fairy circles in Australia supports self-organization theory.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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38 citing papers in PubMed, 204 citations in OpenAlex.
- Deep learning twined spatial analysis for detection of mysterious fairy circles.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Causes and consequences of disordered hyperuniformity in global drylands.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Can spatial self-organization inhibit evolutionary adaptation?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Article
- Australian fairy circles and termite linyji are not caused by the same mechanism.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Phenotypic plasticity: A missing element in the theory of vegetation pattern formation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The hidden order of Turing patterns in arid and semi-arid vegetation ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Fairy circle tales.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The global biogeography and environmental drivers of fairy circles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- First Peoples' knowledge leads scientists to reveal 'fairy circles' and termite linyji are linked in Australia.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Review
- Self-organized sulfide-driven traveling pulses shape seagrass meadows.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
- Evidence for scale-dependent root-antation feedback and its role in halting the spread of a pantropical shrub into an endemic sedge.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Factors affecting establishment and population growth of the invasive weedFrontiers in plant science · 2023Article
- Assessing soil microbes that drive fairy ring patterns in temperate semiarid grasslands.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Article
- High-integrity human intervention in ecosystems: Tracking self-organization modes.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Revisiting Theron's hypothesis on the origin of fairy circles after four decades: Euphorbias are not the cause.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 7 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Vegetation gap patterns in arid grasslands, such as the "fairy circles" of Namibia, are one of nature's greatest mysteries and subject to a lively debate on their origin. They are characterized by small-scale hexagonal ordering of circular bare-soil gaps that persists uniformly in the landscape scale to form a homogeneous distribution. Pattern-formation theory predicts that such highly ordered gap patterns should be found also in other water-limited systems across the globe, even if the mechanisms of their formation are different. Here we report that so far unknown fairy circles with the same spatial structure exist 10,000 km away from Namibia in the remote outback of Australia. Combining fieldwork, remote sensing, spatial pattern analysis, and process-based mathematical modeling, we demonstrate that these patterns emerge by self-organization, with no correlation with termite activity; the driving mechanism is a positive biomass-water feedback associated with water runoff and biomass-dependent infiltration rates. The remarkable match between the patterns of Australian and Namibian fairy circles and model results indicate that both patterns emerge from a nonuniform stationary instability, supporting a central universality principle of pattern-formation theory. Applied to the context of dryland vegetation, this principle predicts that different systems that go through the same instability type will show similar vegetation patterns even if the feedback mechanisms and resulting soil-water distributions are different, as we indeed found by comparing the Australian and the Namibian fairy-circle ecosystems. These results suggest that biomass-water feedbacks and resultant vegetation gap patterns are likely more common in remote drylands than is currently known.
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