ArticleScientific reports2018
Signatures of human impact on self-organized vegetation in the Horn of Africa.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evolution shapes ecosystem resilience through spatial self-organization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- An integrodifference model for vegetation patterns in semi-arid environments with seasonality.Journal of mathematical biology · 2020Article
- The effect of climate change on the resilience of ecosystems with adaptive spatial pattern formation.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- Bush encroachment dynamics and rangeland management implications in southern Ethiopia.Ecology and evolution · 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
- A topographic mechanism for arcing of dryland vegetation bands.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In many dryland environments, vegetation self-organizes into bands that can be clearly identified in remotely-sensed imagery. The status of individual bands can be tracked over time, allowing for a detailed remote analysis of how human populations affect the vital balance of dryland ecosystems. In this study, we characterize vegetation change in areas of the Horn of Africa where imagery taken in the early 1950s is available. We find that substantial change is associated with steep increases in human activity, which we infer primarily through the extent of road and dirt track development. A seemingly paradoxical signature of human impact appears as an increase in the widths of the vegetation bands, which effectively increases the extent of vegetation cover in many areas. We show that this widening occurs due to altered rates of vegetation colonization and mortality at the edges of the bands, and conjecture that such changes are driven by human-induced shifts in plant species composition. Our findings suggest signatures of human impact that may aid in identifying and monitoring vulnerable drylands in the Horn of Africa.
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