Spatial self-organization of vegetation in water-limited systems: mechanistic causes, empirical tests, and ecosystem-level consequences

Autor: Martínez-García, Ricardo, Cabal, Ciro, Bonachela, Juan Antonio, Calabrese, Justin, Hernández-García, Emilio, López, Cristóbal, Tarnita, Corina E.
Přispěvatelé: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, Instituto Serrapilheira, Simons Foundation, Princeton University, Center of Advanced Systems Understanding (Germany), Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany), Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Free State of Saxony, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (España), European Commission, Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España)
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Digital.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
instname
Digital.CSIC: Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Popis: Self-organized spatial patterns of vegetation are frequent in water-limited regions and have been suggested as important ecosystem health indicators. However, the mechanisms underlying their formation remain unclear. It has been hypothesized that patterns could emerge from a water-mediated scale-dependent feedback (SDF), whereby interactions favoring plant growth dominate at short distances while growth-inhibitory interactions dominate in the long-range. As precipitation declines, this framework predicts a sequential change from gapped to labyrinthine to spotted spatial patterns. However, we know little about how net plant-to-plant interactions may shift from positive to negative as a function of inter-individual distance, and in the absence of strong empirical support, the relevance of SDF for vegetation pattern formation remains disputed. Alternative theories show that the same sequence of patterns could emerge when interactions between plants are always inhibitory if their intensity decays sharply enough with inter-individual distance. Although these alternative hypotheses lead to visually indistinguishable spatial distributions of plants, they predict different ecosystem-level consequences for the patterns, thus limiting their potential use as ecosystem-state indicators. Therefore, to make reliable ecological predictions, models need to accurately capture the mechanisms at play in the systems of interest. Here, we review existing theories for vegetation self-organization and their conflicting ecosystem-level predictions. We discuss ways to reconcile these predictions. We focus on the mechanistic differences among models, which can provide valuable information to help researchers decide which model to use for a particular system and/or whether it requires modification.
“RMG: FAPESP through grants ICTP-SAIFR 2016/01343-7, and Programa Jovens Pesquisadores em Centros Emergentes 2019/24433-0 and 2019/05523-8, Instituto Serrapilheira through grant Serra-1911-31200, and the Simons Foundation. CC: the Princeton University May Fellowship in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. JMC: Center of Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) which is financed by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and by the Saxon Ministry for Science, Culture and Tourism (SMWK) with tax fundson the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament. EHG and CL: MINECO/AEI/FEDER through theMaría de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711, Spain). CET & JAB acknowledge supportfrom the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, grant #7800.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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