ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Multistability of model and real dryland ecosystems through spatial self-organization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolution shapes ecosystem resilience through spatial self-organization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Early Warning Signals in Ecological Time-Series.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- How spatial patterns can lead to less resilient ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Predicting instabilities in transient landforms and interconnected ecosystems.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Wavelength Selection for Periodic Travelling Waves: An Unsolved Problem.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- How spatiotemporal dynamics can enhance ecosystem resilience.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A Busse Balloon in the Lagoon: Herbivore Behaviour Generates Spatial Patterns in Coral Reef Ecosystems.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Can spatial self-organization inhibit evolutionary adaptation?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Article
- Emergent coral reef patterning via spatial self-organization.Coral reefs (Online) · 2025Article
- 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
- A robust method for designing multistable systems by embedding bistable subsystems.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2022Article
- Article
- 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
- An integrodifference model for vegetation patterns in semi-arid environments with seasonality.Journal of mathematical biology · 2020Article
- A nucleation framework for transition between alternate states: short-circuiting barriers to ecosystem recovery.Ecology · 2020Article
- The effect of climate change on the resilience of ecosystems with adaptive spatial pattern formation.Ecology letters · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Spatial self-organization of dryland vegetation constitutes one of the most promising indicators for an ecosystem's proximity to desertification. This insight is based on studies of reaction-diffusion models that reproduce visual characteristics of vegetation patterns observed on aerial photographs. However, until now, the development of reliable early warning systems has been hampered by the lack of more in-depth comparisons between model predictions and real ecosystem patterns. In this paper, we combined topographical data, (remotely sensed) optical data, and in situ biomass measurements from two sites in Somalia to generate a multilevel description of dryland vegetation patterns. We performed an in-depth comparison between these observed vegetation pattern characteristics and predictions made by the extended-Klausmeier model for dryland vegetation patterning. Consistent with model predictions, we found that for a given topography, there is multistability of ecosystem states with different pattern wavenumbers. Furthermore, observations corroborated model predictions regarding the relationships between pattern wavenumber, total biomass, and maximum biomass. In contrast, model predictions regarding the role of slope angles were not corroborated by the empirical data, suggesting that inclusion of small-scale topographical heterogeneity is a promising avenue for future model development. Our findings suggest that patterned dryland ecosystems may be more resilient to environmental change than previously anticipated, but this enhanced resilience crucially depends on the adaptive capacity of vegetation patterns.
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