Buxton, Joshua E;
Abrams, Jesse F;
Boulton, Chris A;
Barlow, Nick;
Smith, Camila Rangel;
Van Stroud, Samuel;
Lees, Kirsten J;
(2022)
Quantitatively monitoring the resilience of patterned vegetation in the Sahel.
Global Change Biology
, 28
(2)
pp. 571-587.
10.1111/gcb.15939.
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Abstract
Patterning of vegetation in drylands is a consequence of localized feedback mechanisms. Such feedbacks also determine ecosystem resilience—i.e. the ability to recover from perturbation. Hence, the patterning of vegetation has been hypothesized to be an indicator of resilience, that is, spots are less resilient than labyrinths. Previous studies have made this qualitative link and used models to quantitatively explore it, but few have quantitatively analysed available data to test the hypothesis. Here we provide methods for quantitatively monitoring the resilience of patterned vegetation, applied to 40 sites in the Sahel (a mix of previously identified and new ones). We show that an existing quantification of vegetation patterns in terms of a feature vector metric can effectively distinguish gaps, labyrinths, spots, and a novel category of spot–labyrinths at their maximum extent, whereas NDVI does not. The feature vector pattern metric correlates with mean precipitation. We then explored two approaches to measuring resilience. First we treated the rainy season as a perturbation and examined the subsequent rate of decay of patterns and NDVI as possible measures of resilience. This showed faster decay rates—conventionally interpreted as greater resilience—associated with wetter, more vegetated sites. Second we detrended the seasonal cycle and examined temporal autocorrelation and variance of the residuals as possible measures of resilience. Autocorrelation and variance of our pattern metric increase with declining mean precipitation, consistent with loss of resilience. Thus, drier sites appear less resilient, but we find no significant correlation between the mean or maximum value of the pattern metric (and associated morphological pattern types) and either of our measures of resilience.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Quantitatively monitoring the resilience of patterned vegetation in the Sahel |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/gcb.15939 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15939 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2021 The Authors. Global Change Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Africa, drylands, patterned vegetation, resilience, Sahel |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Physics and Astronomy |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173331 |
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