How Spatial Patterns Can Lead to Less Resilient Ecosystems

Explore how spatial patterns in ecosystems may actually reduce rather than enhance resilience in this 31-minute lecture from the Workshop on "Modelling Diffusive Systems: Theory & Biological Applications (MoDiS)" at the Erwin Schrödinger International Institute. Examine a unifying framework that challenges prevailing theoretical models by incorporating more realistic conditions including finite vegetated areas surrounded by desert and anisotropic environmental conditions leading to non-reciprocal plant interactions. Discover a novel desertification mechanism known as convective instability from physics that has been largely overlooked in ecology, which occurs when non-reciprocal interactions destabilize the vegetation-desert interface and can trigger desertification fronts even under stress levels where traditional isotropic models predict stability. Learn how ecosystems with periodic vegetation patterns demonstrate greater susceptibility to convective instabilities compared to those with homogeneous vegetation, providing evidence that spatial patterning may actually reduce ecosystem resilience. Gain insights into how this research provides a new framework for investigating spatial dynamics and their impact on ecological system stability and resilience under changing environmental conditions, fundamentally challenging the conventional wisdom about self-organized patterning in ecosystem resilience.