Colonial Disjunction in the Sahelian Countries

Garcia, Rolando V.; Spitz, Pierre

doi:10.1016/b978-0-08-025825-6.50013-6

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Examples include the shift to eutrophication in shallow lakes (Scheffer et al, 1993), the transition to overgrazed kelp forests (Simenstad et al, 1978), the collapse of fish stocks due to overfishing in the North Atlantic (Hilborn & Litzinger, 2009), or abrupt desertification in drylands (Garcia & Spitz, 1961). Detecting these shifts in advance requires a deep mechanistic understanding of the ecological system in question based either on experiments or sufficiently long and detailed monitored data (Scheffer & Carpenter, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remotely-sensed slowing down in spatially patterned dryland ecosystems

Veldhuis

Martínez-García

Deblauwe

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Regular vegetation patterns have been predicted to indicate a system slowing down and possibly desertification of drylands. However, these predictions have not yet been observed in dryland vegetation due to the inherent logistic difficulty to gather longer-term in situ data. Here, we use recently developed methods using remote-sensing EVI time-series in combination with classified regular vegetation patterns along a rainfall gradient in Sudan to test these predictions. Overall, three temporal indicators (responsiveness, temporal autocorrelation, variance) show slowing down as vegetation patterns change from gaps to labyrinths to spots towards more arid conditions, confirming predictions. However, this transition exhibits non-linearities, specifically when patterns change configuration. Model simulations reveal that the transition between patterns temporarily slows down the system affecting the temporal indicators. These transient states when vegetation patterns reorganize thus affect the systems resilience indicators in a non-linear way. Our findings suggest that spatial self-organization of dryland vegetation is associated with critical slowing down, but this transition towards reduced resilience happens in a non-linear way. Future work should aim to better understand transient dynamics in regular vegetation patterns in dryland ecosystems, because long transients make regular vegetation patterns of limited use for management in anticipating critical transitions.

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