Dresden 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 1: Patterns in Nature and Materials (DY/BP/CPP)

DY 1.3: Tutorium

Sonntag, 19. März 2017, 17:40–18:30, HSZ 04

What can pattern formation theory tell us about ecosystem response to climate change? — •Ehud Meron — Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

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 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-forming instabilities and front dynamics on state transitions (regime shifts), and restoration of degraded landscapes as a spatial resonance problem. I will conclude with a discussion of a major problem in our current era, the Anthropocene, namely, how to reconcile human intervention in ecosystems dynamics with ecological integrity.

E. Meron, Nonlinear Physics of Ecosystems, CRC Press 2015.

E. Meron, Pattern formation – A missing link in the study of ecosystem response to environmental changes, Mathematical Biosciences 271, 1 (2016).