Related papers: How spatial patterns can lead to less resilient ec…

Anthropogenic activity threatens biodiversity through climate change, habitat fragmentation, and increasing frequency and scale of disturbance. Various theoretical studies have sought to shed light on how these factors could promote or…

Spatial systems with heterogeneities are ubiquitous in nature, from precipitation, temperature and soil gradients controlling vegetation growth to morphogen gradients controlling gene expression in embryos. Such systems, generally described…

Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…

In his seminal work in the 1970s, Robert May suggested that there is an upper limit to the number of species that can be sustained in stable equilibrium by an ecosystem. This deduction was at odds with both intuition and the observed…

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.…

Mays celebrated theoretical work of the 70s contradicted the established paradigm by demonstrating that complexity leads to instability in biological systems. Here Mays random-matrix modelling approach is generalized to realistic…

We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…

How do landscape fragmentation affects ecosystems diversity and stability is an important and complex question in ecology with no simple answer, as spatially separated habitats where species live are highly dynamic rather than just static.…

Many parts of the Earth system are thought to have multiple stable equilibrium states, with the potential for rapid and sometimes catastrophic shifts between them. The most common frameworks for analyzing stability changes, however, require…

Self-organization, the ability of a system of microscopically interacting entities to shape macroscopically ordered structures, is ubiquitous in Nature. Spatio-temporal patterns are abundantly observed in a large plethora of applications,…

Spatial structure and species interactions jointly shape the dynamics and biodiversity of ecological systems, yet most theoretical models either neglect spatial heterogeneity or sacrifice analytical tractability. Here, we provide a unified…

Spatial pattern formation is a key feature of many natural systems in physics, chemistry and biology. The essential theoretical issue in understanding pattern formation is to explain how a spatially homogeneous initial state can undergo…

Pattern formation often occurs in spatially extended physical, biological and chemical systems due to an instability of the homogeneous steady state. The type of the instability usually prescribes the resulting spatio-temporal patterns and…

We propose a general model to study the interplay between spatial dispersal and environment spatiotemporal fluctuations in metapopulation dynamics. An ecological landscape of favorable patches is generated like a L\'{e}vy dust, which allows…

The process of desertification in the semi-arid climatic zone is considered by many as a catastrophic regime shift, since the positive feedback of vegetation density on growth rates yields a system that admits alternative steady states.…

Industrial ecosystems are coupled with natural systems through utilization of feedstocks and waste disposal. To ensure resilience in production of industrial systems under the threat of climate change scenarios, it is necessary to evaluate…

Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…

Dryland ecosystems commonly exhibit periodic bands of vegetation, thought to form due to competition between individual plants for heterogeneously distributed water. In this paper, we develop a Fourier method for locally identifying the…

Self-organizing processes shape Earth's surface, creating complex patterns from simple rules in most landforms. Rainfall-induced mass movements dramatically reshape landscapes through rapid sediment transfer, but whether they self-organize…

Previous work indicates that tropical forest can exist as an alternative stable state to savanna. Therefore, perturbation by climate change or human impact may lead to crossing of a tipping point beyond which there is rapid forest dieback…