Lecturer: Prof. Ehud Meron
Affiliation: Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research
& Physics Department,
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Abstract:
Dryland landscapes show a variety of vegetation
pattern-formation phenomena; banded
vegetation on hill slopes and nearly hexagonal
patterns of bare-soil gaps in grasslands (“fairy
circles”) are two striking examples. Vegetation
pattern formation is a population-level
mechanism to cope with water stress. It couples
to other response mechanisms operating at
lower and higher organization levels, such as
phenotypic changes at the organism level and
biodiversity changes at the community level,
and plays a crucial role in understanding
ecosystem response and ecosystem function in
changing environments.
In this talk I will present a platform of
mathematical models for dryland ecosystems
and describe some of the ecological questions
we have studied using this platform. I will
discuss the mechanisms that destabilize
uniform vegetation and lead to periodic
vegetation patterns, the variety of extended
and localized patterns that can appear along a
rainfall gradient, the impact of pattern
formation on critical state transitions (regime
shifts), pattern-induced species coexistence,
and restoration of degraded landscapes as a
spatial resonance problem. I will conclude with
a discussion of two open problems, the coupling
between pattern formation and biodiversity,
and the reconciliation of human intervention
and ecological integrity in disturbed
ecosystems.