Related papers: Emergent structure and dynamics of tropical forest…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
The role of forest heterogeneity in the long-term, large-scale dynamics of forest fires is investigated by means of a cellular automata model and mean field approximation. Heterogeneity was conceived as trees (or acres of forest) with…
Tree-grass coexistence is a defining feature of savanna ecosystems, which play an important role in supporting biodiversity and human populations worldwide. While recent advances have clarified many of the underlying processes, how these…
In this work, we present and analyze a general framework for vegetation dynamics in arid and semi-arid ecosystems in which non-local interactions are purely competitive. The generality of the formulation enables a systematic search for…
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…
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…
Observed bimodal tree cover distributions at particular environmental conditions and theoretical models indicate that some areas in the tropics can be in either of the alternative stable vegetation states forest or savanna. However, when…
Savanna ecosystems are shaped by the frequency and intensity of regular fires. We model savannas via an ordinary differential equation (ODE) encoding a one-sided inhibitory Lotka-Volterra interaction between trees and grass. By applying…
Vegetation in semi-arid environments self-organizes into striking spatial patterns -- bands, spots, labyrinths, and gaps -- with characteristic wavelengths on the order of tens to hundreds of meters. Existing reaction-diffusion models…
We introduce the concept of 'dynamical phase coexistence' to provide a simple solution for a long-standing problem in theoretical ecology, the so-called "savanna problem". The challenge is to understand why in savanna ecosystems trees 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…
We develop a landscape-flux framework to investigate observed frequency distributions of vegetation and the stability of these ecological systems under fluctuations. The frequency distributions can characterize the population-potential…
This paper investigates the conditions for the stability and emergence of patterns in a new three-component reaction-diffusion system. The system describes the coexistence and interaction of water reservoirs, vegetation, and bushfire…
Understanding the causes and effects of spatial vegetation patterns is a fundamental problem in ecology, especially because these can be used as early predictors of catastrophic shifts such as desertification processes. Empirical studies of…
We propose a model to study the spatiotemporal dynamics of biocrust and vegetation cover on sand dunes. The model consists of two coupled partial nonlinear differential equations and includes diffusion and advection terms for modeling the…