Linking spatial self-organization to community assembly and biodiversity

Temporal shifts to drier climates impose environmental stresses on plant communities that may result in community reassembly and threatened ecosystem services, but also may trigger self-organization in spatial patterns of biota and resources, which act to relax these stresses. The complex relationships between these counteracting processes - community reassembly and spatial self-organization - have hardly been studied. Using a spatio-temporal model of dryland plant communities and a trait-based approach, we study the response of such communities to increasing water-deficit stress. We first show that spatial patterning acts to reverse shifts from fast-growing species to stress-tolerant species, as well as to reverse functional-diversity loss. We then show that spatial self-organization buffers the impact of further stress on community structure. Finally, we identify multistability ranges of uniform and patterned community states and use them to propose forms of non-uniform ecosystem management that integrate the need for provisioning ecosystem services with the need to preserve community structure.

Automated summary

Shifts to drier climates can impose stress on plant communities, potentially leading to community reassembly and threats to ecosystem services, but may also trigger spatial self-organization of biota and resources to alleviate these stresses. The relationships between community reassembly and spatial self-organization have not been widely studied. Research shows that spatial patterns can reverse shifts in species composition and diversity loss, while spatial self-organization can buffer the impact of additional stress on community structure.