Dryland mechanisms could widely control ecosystem functioning in a drier and warmer world.

Responses of terrestrial ecosystems to climate change have been explored in many regions worldwide. While continued drying and warming may alter process rates and deteriorate the state and performance of ecosystems, it could also lead to more fundamental changes in the mechanisms governing ecosystem functioning. Here we argue that climate change will induce unprecedented shifts in these mechanisms in historically wetter climatic zones, towards mechanisms currently prevalent in dry regions, which we refer to as 'dryland mechanisms'.

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.

The role of spatial self-organization in the design of agroforestry systems.

The development of sustainable agricultural systems in drylands is currently a crucial issue in the context of mitigating the outcomes of population growth under the conditions of climatic changes. The need to meet the growing demand for food, fodder, and fuel, together with the hazards due to climate change, requires cross-disciplinary studies of ways to increase livelihood while minimizing the impact on the environment. Practices of agroforestry systems, in which herbaceous species are intercropped between rows of woody species plantations, have been shown to mitigate several of the predicaments of climatic changes.

Front Instabilities Can Reverse Desertification.

Degradation processes in living systems often take place gradually by front propagation. An important context of such processes is loss of biological productivity in drylands or desertification. Using a dryland-vegetation model, we analyze the stability and dynamics of desertification fronts, identify linear and nonlinear front instabilities, and highlight the significance of these instabilities in inducing self-recovery.

Discovery of fairy circles in Australia supports self-organization theory.

Vegetation gap patterns in arid grasslands, such as the "fairy circles" of Namibia, are one of nature's greatest mysteries and subject to a lively debate on their origin. They are characterized by small-scale hexagonal ordering of circular bare-soil gaps that persists uniformly in the landscape scale to form a homogeneous distribution. Pattern-formation theory predicts that such highly ordered gap patterns should be found also in other water-limited systems across the globe, even if the mechanisms of their formation are different.