Abstract
We study a mathematical model for the dynamics of patterned dryland vegetation in the presence of rainfall intermittency, adopting a spatially explicit approach. We find that most results found for constant precipitation carry over to the case of intermittent rainfall, with a few important novelties. For intermittent precipitation, the functional forms of the water uptake and consequently of the vegetation growth rate play an important role. Nonlinear, concave-up forms of water uptake as a function of soil moisture lead to a beneficial effect of rainfall intermittency, with a stronger effect when vegetation feedbacks are absent. The results obtained with the explicit-space model employed here are in keeping with those provided by simpler, implicit-space approaches, and provide a more complete view of vegetation dynamics in arid ecosystems.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 574-583 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Journal of Theoretical Biology |
Volume | 256 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 21 Feb 2009 |
Keywords
- Drylands
- Ecosystem modeling
- Rainfall
- Spatial-temporal patterns
- Vegetation dynamics
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Statistics and Probability
- Modeling and Simulation
- General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
- General Immunology and Microbiology
- General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
- Applied Mathematics