ArticleNature communications2019
A Lévy expansion strategy optimizes early dune building by beach grasses.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Density-dependent aggregation underlies spatial self-organization in coastal dunes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A connectivity threshold between grass patches amplifies coastal dune formation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Geomorphological changes of natural and engineered vegetated foredunes since completion of Kustwerk Katwijk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Recreation impact on the early establishment of dune-building grassesJournal of coastal conservation · 2025Article
- Complex behavior from intrinsic motivation to occupy future action-state path space.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Review
- Self-organized mud cracking amplifies the resilience of an iconic "Red Beach" salt marsh.Science advances · 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
- Activity-Induced Enhancement of Superdiffusive Transport in Bacterial Turbulence.Micromachines · 2022Article
- Wrack enhancement of post-hurricane vegetation and geomorphological recovery in a coastal dune.PloS one · 2022Article
- The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Fairy circles reveal the resilience of self-organized salt marshes.Science advances · 2021Article
- Sediment availability provokes a shift from Brownian to Lévy-like clonal expansion in a dune building grass.Ecology letters · 2021Article
- Facultative mutualisms: A double-edged sword for foundation species in the face of anthropogenic global change.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Resilience of beach grasses along a biogeomorphic successive gradient: resource availability vs. clonal integration.Oecologia · 2020Article
- A Lévy expansion strategy optimizes early dune building by beach grasses.Nature communications · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Lifeforms ranging from bacteria to humans employ specialized random movement patterns. Although effective as optimization strategies in many scientific fields, random walk application in biology has remained focused on search optimization by mobile organisms. Here, we report on the discovery that heavy-tailed random walks underlie the ability of clonally expanding plants to self-organize and dictate the formation of biogeomorphic landscapes. Using cross-Atlantic surveys, we show that congeneric beach grasses adopt distinct heavy-tailed clonal expansion strategies. Next, we demonstrate with a spatially explicit model and a field experiment that the Lévy-type strategy of the species building the highest dunes worldwide generates a clonal network with a patchy shoot organization that optimizes sand trapping efficiency. Our findings demonstrate Lévy-like movement in plants, and emphasize the role of species-specific expansion strategies in landscape formation. This mechanistic understanding paves the way for tailor-made planting designs to successfully construct and restore biogeomorphic landscapes and their services.
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