Related papers: Fairy circle landscapes under the sea
Sea urchin feeding fronts are a striking example of spatial pattern formation in an ecological system. If it is assumed that urchins are asocial, and that they move randomly, then the formation of these dense fronts is an apparent paradox.…
Atolls are traditionally explained as the result of coral reefs accreting around volcanic islands followed by gradual subsidence, yielding a hollow, ring-shaped rim that can extend for kilometres. However, satellite imagery shows that…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
We provide numerical evidence for the existence of a cascade of filament instabilities in the surface quasigeostrophic system for atmospheric and oceanic motions near a horizontal boundary. The cascade involves geometrically shrinking…
Equilibrium statistical mechanics of two-dimensional flows provides an explanation and a prediction for the self-organization of large scale coherent structures. This theory is applied in this paper to the description of oceanic rings and…
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…
Drylands are pattern-forming systems showing self-organized vegetation patchiness, multiplicity of stable states and fronts separating domains of alternative stable states. Pattern dynamics, induced by droughts or disturbances, can result…
Seagrasses are vital organisms in coastal waters, and the drastic demise of their population in the last decades has worrying implications for marine ecosystems. Spatial models for seagrass meadows provide a mathematical framework to study…
Metapopulation models have been instrumental in demonstrating the ecological impact of landscape structure on the survival of a focal species in complex environments. However, extensions to multiple species with arbitrary dispersal networks…
Cosmological models have granted dwarf galaxies a key role: their properties constrain the distribution of dark matter and the physical evolution of their hosts. There is increasing evidence that objects with masses of dwarf galaxies form…
Spatial patterns are widely observed in numerous nonequilibrium natural systems, often undergoing complex transitions and bifurcations, thereby exhibiting significant importance in many physical and biological systems such as embryonic…
Dune fields are commonly associated with periodic patterns that are among the most recognizable landscapes on Earth and other planetary bodies. However, in zones of limited sediment supply, where periodic dunes elongate and align in the…
We analyze a spatially extended version of a well-known model of forest-savanna dynamics, which presents as a system of nonlinear partial integro-differential equations, and study necessary conditions for pattern-forming bifurcations.…
The deep-water fauna of the Mediterranean is characterized by an absence of distinctive characteristics and by a relative impoverishment. Both are a result of events after the Messinian salinity crisis (Late Miocene). The three main classes…
[Abridged] Within the hierarchical framework for galaxy formation, minor merging and tidal interactions are expected to shape all large galaxies to the present day. As a consequence, most seemingly normal disk galaxies should be surrounded…
We report here on a laboratory-scale experiment which reproduces a rich variety of natural patterns with few control parameters. In particular, we focus on intriguing rhomboid structures often found on sandy shores and flats. We show that…
Beautiful dune patterns can be found in deserts and along coasts due to the instability of a plain sheet of sand under the action of the wind. Barchan dunes are highly mobile aeolian dunes found in areas of low sand availability and…
We derive general depth-integrated model equations for overland flows featuring the evolution of suspended sediment that may be eroded from or deposited onto the underlying topography ('morphodynamics'). The resulting equations include…
When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…
Chiral active particles, or self-propelled circle swimmers, from sperm cells to asymmetric Janus colloids, form a rich set of patterns, which are different from those seen in linear swimmers. Such patterns have mainly been explored for…