Emergent Spatial Patterns Can Indicate Upcoming Regime Shifts in a Realistic Model of Coral Community.

AbstractIncreased stress on coastal ecosystems, such as coral reefs, seagrasses, kelp forests, and other habitats, can make them shift toward degraded, often algae-dominated or barren communities. This has already occurred in many places around the world, calling for new approaches to identify where such regime shifts may be triggered. Theoretical work predicts that the spatial structure of habitat-forming species should exhibit changes prior to regime shifts, such as an increase in spatial autocorrelation.

Self-organization as a mechanism of resilience in dryland ecosystems.

Self-organized spatial patterns are a common feature of complex systems, ranging from microbial communities to mussel beds and drylands. While the theoretical implications of these patterns for ecosystem-level processes, such as functioning and resilience, have been extensively studied, empirical evidence remains scarce. To address this gap, we analyzed global drylands along an aridity gradient using remote sensing, field data, and modeling.

Impact of different destocking strategies on the resilience of dry rangelands.

Half of the world's livestock live in (semi-)arid regions, where a large proportion of people rely on animal husbandry for their survival. However, overgrazing can lead to land degradation and subsequent socio-economic crises. Sustainable management of dry rangeland requires suitable stocking strategies and has been the subject of intense debate in the last decades.

Increased aridity drives post-fire recovery of Mediterranean forests towards open shrublands.

Recent observations suggest that repeated fires could drive Mediterranean forests to shrublands, hosting flammable vegetation that regrows quickly after fire. This feedback supposedly favours shrubland persistence and may be strengthened in the future by predicted increased aridity. An assessment was made of how fires and aridity in combination modulated the dynamics of Mediterranean ecosystems and whether the feedback could be strong enough to maintain shrubland as an alternative stable state to forest.