Related papers: How spatial patterns can lead to less resilient ec…
Resilience is a system's ability to maintain its function when perturbations and errors occur. Whilst we understand low-dimensional networked systems' behavior well, our understanding of systems consisting of a large number of components is…
We apply two independent data analysis methodologies to locate stable climate states in an intermediate complexity climate model and analyze their interplay. First, drawing from the theory of quasipotentials, and viewing the state space as…
Shifting ecosystem disturbance patterns due to climate change (e.g. storms, droughts, wildfires) or direct human interference (e.g. harvests, nutrient loading) highlight the importance of quantifying and strengthening the resilience of…
Strong nonlinear effects combined with diffusive coupling may give rise to unpredictable evolution in spatially extended deterministic dynamical systems even in the presence of a fully negative spectrum of Lyapunov exponents. This regime,…
Evolutionary dynamics are shaped by a variety of fundamental, generic drivers, including spatial structure, ecology, and selection pressure. These drivers impact the trajectory of evolution, and have been hypothesized to influence…
Models of invasive species spread often assume that landscapes are spatially homogeneous; thus simplifying analysis but potentially reducing accuracy. We extend a recently developed partial differential equation model for invasive conifer…
A landfill represents a complex and dynamically evolving structure that can be stochastically perturbed by exogenous factors. Both thermodynamic (equilibrium) and time varying (non-steady state) properties of a landfill are affected by…
The terrestrial water cycle links the soil and atmosphere moisture reservoirs through four fluxes: precipitation, evaporation, runoff, and atmospheric moisture convergence (net import of water vapor to balance runoff). Each of these…
Landscapes are meaningful ecological units that strongly depend on the environmental conditions. Such dependencies between landscapes and the environment have been noted since the beginning of Earth sciences and cast into conceptual models…
Although riparian vegetation is present in or along many water courses of the world, its active role resulting from the interaction with flow and sediment processes has only recently become an active field of research. Especially, the role…
How do interactions between species influence their spatial distribution in an ecosystem? To answer this question, we introduce a spatially-extended ecosystem of Generalized Lotka-Volterra type, where species can diffuse and interactions…
We describe pattern formation in ecological systems using a version of the classical Lotka-Volterra model characterized by a spatial scale which controls the predator-prey interaction range. Analytical and simulational results show that…
Spatial nonstationarity, the location variance of features' statistical distributions, is ubiquitous in many natural settings. For example, in geological reservoirs rock matrix porosity varies vertically due to geomechanical compaction…
Dryland vegetation ecosystems are known to be susceptible to critical transitions between alternative stable states when subjected to external forcing. Such transitions are often discussed through the framework of bifurcation theory, but…
Precipitation is one of the most important meteorological variables for defining the climate dynamics, but the spatial patterns of precipitation have not been fully investigated yet. The complex network theory, which provides a robust tool…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
Soils and sediments are soft, amorphous materials with complex microstructures and mechanical properties, that are also building blocks for industrial materials such as concrete. These Earth-mediated materials evolve under prolonged…
A wide body of work has applied the concept of critical slowing down to estimate the stability of different Earth system components. Most of them -- such as global vegetation -- are inherently non-stationary, for example due to strong…
Network structure or connectivity pattern is critical in determining collective dynamics among interacting species in ecosystems. Conventional research on species persistence in spatial populations has focused on static network structure,…
In this work, the influence of inertial effects on the formation and evolution of vegetation patterns on sloped arid terrains is investigated from the onset of instability to far-from-equilibrium. Analyses are carried out in a hyperbolic…