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Across plant communities worldwide, fire regimes reflect a combination of climatic factors and plant characteristics. To shed new light on the complex relationships between plant characteristics and fire regimes, we developed a new…
Fires and rainfall are major mechanisms that regulate woody and grassy biomasses in savanna ecosystems. Conditions of long-lasting coexistence of trees and grasses have been mainly studied using continuous-time modelling of tree-grass…
Savannas are characterized by a discontinuous tree layer superimposed on a continuous layer of grass. Identifying the mechanisms that facilitate this tree-grass coexistence has remained a persistent challenge in ecology and is known as the…
Ecological communities exhibit pervasive patterns and inter-relationships between size, abundance, and the availability of resources. We use scaling ideas to develop a unified, model-independent framework for understanding the distribution…
Depending on the rule for tree growth, the forest-fire model shows either self-organized criticality with rule-dependent exponents, or synchronization, or an intermediate behavior. This is shown analytically for the one-dimensional system,…
Savannas are dynamical systems where grasses and trees can either dominate or coexist. Fires are known to be central in the functioning of the savanna biome though their characteristics are expected to vary along the rainfall gradients as…
Tree-grass coexistence in savanna ecosystems depends strongly on environmental disturbances out of which crucial is fire. Most modeling attempts in the literature lack stochastic approach to fire occurrences which is essential to reflect…
We propose a model equation for the dynamics of tree density in mesic savannas. It considers long-range competition among trees and the effect of fire acting as a local facilitation mechanism. Despite short-range facilitation is taken to…
Ecological spatial patterns reflect the underlying processes that shape the structure of species and communities. Mechanisms like inter and intra species competition, dispersal and host-pathogen interactions are believed to act over a wide…
Several theoretical models predict that spatial patterning increases ecosystem resilience. However, these predictions rely on simplifying assumptions, such as assuming isotropic and infinitely large ecosystems, and empirical evidence…
Spatio temporal data are more ubiquitous and richer than even before and the availability of such data poses great challenges in data analytics. Ecological facilitation, the positive effect of density of individuals on the individual's…
In tropical regions, fires propagate readily in grasslands but typically consume only edges of forest patches. Thus forest patches grow due to tree propagation and shrink by fires in surrounding grasslands. The interplay between these…
Humans have been able to tackle biosphere complexities by acting as ecosystem engineers, profoundly changing the flows of matter, energy and information. This includes major innovations that allowed to reduce and control the impact of…
Forest fire spreading is a complex phenomenon characterized by a stochastic behavior. Nowadays, the enormous quantity of georeferenced data and the availability of powerful techniques for their analysis can provide a very careful picture of…
Patches of vegetation consist of dense clusters of shrubs, grass, or trees, often found to be circular characteristic size, defined by the properties of the vegetation and terrain. Therefore, vegetation patches can be interpreted as…
The savanna biome is characterised by a continuous vegetation cover, comprised of herbaceous and woody plants. The coexistence of species in arid savannas, where water availability is the main limiting resource for plant growth, provides an…
The forest fire model is a reaction-diffusion model where energy, in the form of trees, is injected uniformly, and burned (dissipated) locally. We show that the spatial distribution of fires forms a novel geometric structure where the…
Self-organized spatial patterns of vegetation are frequent in drylands and, because pattern shape correlates with water availability, they have been suggested as important indicators of ecosystem health. However, the mechanisms underlying…
Forest-savanna bistability - the hypothesis that forests and savannas exist as alternative stable states in the tropics - and its implications are key challenges for mathematical modelers and ecologists in the context of ongoing climate…
Many ecological and spatial processes are complex in nature and are not accurately modeled by linear models. Regression trees promise to handle the high-order interactions that are present in ecological and spatial datasets, but fail to…