Department of Solar Energy and Environmental Physics, BIDR, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede Boqer Campus, Israel.
Physics Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel.
Elife. 2021 Sep 27;10:e73819. doi: 10.7554/eLife.73819.
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. We first show that spatial patterning acts to reverse shifts from fast-growing species to stress-tolerant species, as well as to reverse functional-diversity loss. We then show that spatial self-organization buffers the impact of further stress on community structure. Finally, we identify multistability ranges of uniform and patterned community states and use them to propose forms of non-uniform ecosystem management that integrate the need for provisioning ecosystem services with the need to preserve community structure.
时间推移导致干旱气候对植物群落造成环境压力，可能导致群落重组和受威胁的生态系统服务，但也可能引发生物区系和资源空间格局的自组织，从而缓解这些压力。这些相互抵消的过程——群落重组和空间自组织——之间的复杂关系几乎没有得到研究。利用旱地植物群落的时空模型和基于特征的方法，我们研究了这些群落对日益增加的水分亏缺胁迫的响应。我们首先表明，空间格局作用于逆转从快速生长的物种向耐胁迫物种的转变，以及功能多样性的丧失。然后我们表明，空间自组织缓冲了进一步的压力对群落结构的影响。最后，我们确定了均匀和有图案的群落状态的多稳定性范围，并利用它们提出了非均匀生态系统管理的形式，将提供生态系统服务的需求与保护群落结构的需求结合起来。
