Self-organization and productivity in semi-arid ecosystems: Implications of seasonality in rainfall

Spatial self-organization including striking vegetation patterns observed in arid ecosystems has been studied in models with uniform rainfall. In this paper, we present a fully seasonal rainfall model that produces vegetation patterns found in nature by including the natural adaptation of plants to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of theoretical biology 2007-10, Vol.248 (3), p.490-500
Main Authors: Guttal, Vishwesha, Jayaprakash, C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation, Physiological
Desert Climate
Ecosystem
Models, Biological
Plant Development
Plant Physiological Phenomena
Precipitation
Rain
Reproducibility of Results
Savanna
Seasonal variations in resource
Seasons
Turing instability
Vegetation patterns
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Summary:Spatial self-organization including striking vegetation patterns observed in arid ecosystems has been studied in models with uniform rainfall. In this paper, we present a fully seasonal rainfall model that produces vegetation patterns found in nature by including the natural adaptation of plants to scarcity of water and the consequent seasonal variation in their growth and metabolic rate. We present results for the mean-field and spatially extended versions of the model. We find that the patterns depend on the duration of the wet season even with fixed total annual precipitation ( PPT) showing how seasonality affects spatial self-organization. We observe that the productivity can vary for fixed PPT as a function of the duration thereby providing another source of observed variations. We compute the maximum vegetation cover as function of PPT and find that the behavior is consistent with observations. We comment on the implications for regime shifts due to increased interannual fluctuations caused by climatic changes. Our specific model calculations provide more general conclusions for ecosystems with competition for scarce resources due to seasonal variations in the resource, especially for self-organization and productivity.
ISSN:0022-5193
1095-8541
DOI:10.1016/j.jtbi.2007.05.020