Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 16, Issue 2, Pages 127-139Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL
DOI: 10.1111/ele.12027
Keywords
Drylands; landscape; patch size; patchiness; Poa bulbosa L; scale; self-organisation; template induced; vegetation pattern formation
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Funding
- Israel Science Foundation [780/01]
- James S. McDonnell Foundation
- EU-ARI programme at the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research
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In this article, we develop a unifying framework for the understanding of spatial vegetation patterns in heterogeneous landscapes. While much recent research has focused on self-organised vegetation the prevailing view is still that biological patchiness is mostly due to top-down control by the physical landscape template, disturbances or predators. We suggest that vegetation patchiness in real landscapes is controlled both by the physical template and by self-organisation simultaneously, and introduce a conceptual model for the relative roles of the two mechanisms. The model considers four factors that control whether vegetation patchiness is emerged or imposed: soil patch size, plant size, resource input and resource availability. The last three factors determine the plant-patch size, and the plant-to-soil patch size ratio determines the impact of self-organisation, which becomes important when this ratio is sufficiently small. A field study and numerical simulations of a mathematical model support the conceptual model and give further insight by providing examples of self-organised and template-controlled vegetation patterns co-occurring in the same landscape. We conclude that real landscapes are generally mixtures of template-induced and self-organised patchiness. Patchiness variability increases due to sourcesink resource relations, and decreases for species of larger patch sizes.
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