ArticleNature communications2017
Amazonian forest-savanna bistability and human impact.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vegetation responses to air dryness amplify future land surface warming.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Spatial modeling of forest-savanna bistability: impacts of fire dynamics and timescale separation.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Remotely sensing potential climate change tipping points across scales.Nature communications · 2024Review
- Fire, environmental and anthropogenic controls on pantropical tree cover.Communications earth & environment · 2024Article
- Pattern Formation in Mesic Savannas.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Emergent structure and dynamics of tropical forest-grassland landscapes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The emergence of scale-free fires in Australia.iScience · 2023Article
- Entropy-based early detection of critical transitions in spatial vegetation fields.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A resilience sensing system for the biosphere.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Fire regimes, fire experiments and alternative stable states in mesic savannas: A response to Laris & Jacobs (2021) 'On the problem of natural savanna fires'.The New phytologist · 2021Article
- Climate change, ecosystems and abrupt change: science priorities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Article
- Power laws and critical fragmentation in global forests.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Limiting the high impacts of Amazon forest dieback with no-regrets science and policy action.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Dissipative structures in biological systems: bistability, oscillations, spatial patterns and waves.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2018Review
- Fire forbids fifty-fifty forest.PloS one · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A bimodal distribution of tropical tree cover at intermediate precipitation levels has been presented as evidence of fire-induced bistability. Here we subdivide satellite vegetation data into those from human-unaffected areas and those from regions close to human-cultivated zones. Bimodality is found to be almost absent in the unaffected regions, whereas it is significantly enhanced close to cultivated zones. Assuming higher logging rates closer to cultivated zones and spatial diffusion of fire, our spatiotemporal mathematical model reproduces these patterns. Given a gradient of climatic and edaphic factors, rather than bistability there is a predictable spatial boundary, a Maxwell point, that separates regions where forest and savanna states are naturally selected. While bimodality can hence be explained by anthropogenic edge effects and natural spatial heterogeneity, a narrow range of bimodality remaining in the human-unaffected data indicates that there is still bistability, although on smaller scales than claimed previously.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.