Related papers: Fairy circle landscapes under the sea
Seagrass meadows are among the most important coastal ecosystems, in terms of both spatial extent and ecosystem services, but they are also declining worldwide. Understanding the drivers of seagrass meadow dynamics is essential for…
We used fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) to develop a generic shallow lake ecosystem model by augmenting the individual cognitive maps drawn by 8 scientists working in the area of shallow lake ecology. We calculated graph theoretical indices…
A direct numerical simulation of Faraday waves is carried out in a minimal hexagonal domain. Over long times, we observe the alternation of patterns we call quasi-hexagons and beaded stripes. The symmetries and spatial Fourier spectra of…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
Ecological interactions among phytoplankton occur in a moving fluid environment. Oceanic flows can modulate the competition and coexistence between phytoplankton populations, which in turn can affect ecosystem function and biogeochemical…
Surface wave patterns are investigated experimentally in a system geometry that has become a paradigm of quantum chaos: the stadium billiard. Linear waves in bounded geometries for which classical ray trajectories are chaotic are known to…
A simplified model of clonal plant growth is formulated, motivated by observations of spatial structures in Posidonia oceanica meadows in the Mediterranean Sea. Two levels of approximation are considered for the scale-dependent feedback…
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…
Seagrass meadows serve as critical carbon sinks, but estimating the amount of carbon they store requires knowledge of the seagrass species present. Underwater and surface vehicles equipped with machine learning algorithms can help to…
Nonuniform spatial distributions of vegetation in scarce environments consist of either gaps, bands often called tiger bush or patches that can be either self-organized or spatially localized in space. When the level of aridity is…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species' reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range…
Precisely how ecological factors influence animal social structure is far from clear. We explore this question using an agent-based model inspired by the fission-fusion society of Spider monkeys (Ateles spp). Our model introduces a…
Localised radial patterns have been observed in the vegetation of semi-arid ecosystems, often as localised patches of vegetation or in the form of `fairy circles'. We consider stationary localised radial solutions to a reduced model for…
Ocean submesoscales, flows with characteristic size around 10 m - 10 km, are transitional between the larger, rotationally-constrained mesoscale and three-dimensional turbulence. In this paper we present simulations of a submesoscale ocean…
Ocean motions at frequencies of the internal wave band are generally associated with freely propagating waves that are supported by stable vertical stratification in density. Previous analyses of yearlong current observations from the Bay…
Small seasonal wetlands are a distinctive feature of the semi-arid environments. Although these systems are small and ephemeral in nature, they provide habitats to aquatic flora and fauna, and play a critical role in sustaining livelihoods…
Patterned vegetation is a characteristic feature of many dryland ecosystems. While plant densities on the ecosystem-wide scale are typically low, a spatial self-organisation principle leads to the occurrence of alternating patches of high…
The phase space of an area-preserving map typically contains infinitely many elliptic islands embedded in a chaotic sea. Orbits near the boundary of a chaotic region have been observed to stick for long times, strongly influencing their…