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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…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
Spatial patterning and synchronization are pervasive features of plankton communities, yet the mechanisms that allow such patterns to persist coherently under environmental noise remain unresolved. In vertically structured aquatic…
Ecological networks exhibit non-random structural patterns, such as modularity and nestedness, which indicate ecosystem stability, species diversity, and connectance. Such structure-stability relationships are well known. However, another…
The minimal ecological requirements for formation of regular vegetation patterns in semiarid systems have been recently questioned. Against the general belief that a combination of facilitative and competitive interactions is necessary,…
The scarcity of water characterising drylands forces vegetation to adopt appropriate survival strategies. Some of these generate water-vegetation feedback mechanisms that can lead to spatial self-organisation of vegetation, as it has been…
Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…
A particular sequence of patterns, "$\text{gaps} \to \text{labyrinth} \to \text{spots}$," occurs with decreasing precipitation in previously reported numerical simulations of PDE dryland vegetation models. These observations have led to the…
In many drylands around the globe, vegetation self-organizes into regular spatial patterns in response to aridity stress. We consider the regularly-spaced vegetation bands, on gentle hill-slopes, that survive low rainfall conditions by…
Enhancement of the predictive power and robustness of nonlinear population dynamics models allows ecologists to make more reliable forecasts about species' long term survival. However, the limited availability of detailed ecological data,…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
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…
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…
Vegetation patterns are abundant in arid and semiarid ecosystems, but how they form remains unclear. One of the most extended theories lies in the existence of scale-dependent feedbacks (SDF) in plant-to-plant and plant-water interactions.…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
We investigate how environmental flows influence spatial pattern formation and population dynamics using two nonlocal models of population dynamics, which we couple to two different stationary flows. Combining numerical simulations and…
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…
Unstoppable feedback loops and tipping points in socio-ecological systems are the main threats to sustainability. These behaviors have been extensively studied, notably to predict, and arguably deviate, dead-end trajectories. Behind the…
We study a model ecosystem by means of dynamical techniques from disordered systems theory. The model describes a set of species subject to competitive interactions through a background of resources, which they feed upon. Additionally…
Water availability is a major environmental driver affecting riparian and wetland vegetation. The interaction between water table fluctuations and vegetation in a stochastic environment contributes to the complexity of the dynamics of these…