English

Does wind affect the orientation of vegetation stripes? A copula-based mixture model for axial and circular data

Applications 2024-11-19 v1

Abstract

Motivated by a case study of vegetation patterns, we introduce a mixture model with concomitant variables to examine the association between the orientation of vegetation stripes and wind direction. The proposal relies on a novel copula-based bivariate distribution for mixed axial and circular observations and provides a parsimonious and computationally tractable approach to examine the dependence of two environmental variables observed in a complex manifold. The findings suggest that dominant winds shape the orientation of vegetation stripes through a mechanism of neighbouring plants providing wind shelter to downwind individuals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.11461,
  title  = {Does wind affect the orientation of vegetation stripes? A copula-based mixture model for axial and circular data},
  author = {Marco Mingione and Francesco Lagona and Priyanka Nagar and Francois von Holtzhausen and Andriette Bekker and Janine Schoombie and Peter C. le Roux},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.11461},
  year   = {2024}
}