ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
The global biogeography and environmental drivers of fairy circles.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multiple Sustainable Practices Are Crucial for Enhancing the Provisioning of Agroecosystem Services Worldwide.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- 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
- Research needs on the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship in drylands.npj biodiversity · 2024Review
- 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
- Fairy circle tales.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Fairy circles (FCs) are regular vegetation patterns found in drylands of Namibia and Western Australia. It is virtually unknown whether they are also present in other regions of the world and which environmental factors determine their distribution. We conducted a global systematic survey and found FC-like vegetation patterns in 263 sites from 15 countries and three continents, including the Sahel, Madagascar, and Middle-West Asia. FC-like vegetation patterns are found in environments characterized by a unique combination of soil (including low nutrient levels and high sand content) and climatic (arid regions with high temperatures and high precipitation seasonality) conditions. In addition to these factors, the presence of specific biological elements (termite nests) in certain regions also plays a role in the presence of these patterns. Furthermore, areas with FC-like vegetation patterns also showed more stable temporal productivity patterns than those of surrounding areas. Our study presents a global atlas of FCs and provides unique insights into the ecology and biogeography of these fascinating vegetation patterns.
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