Title
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Modelling tree-grass coexistence in water-limited ecosystems
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Author
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Abstract
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Tree-grass coexistence is commonly observed in arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Many of these ecosys-tems are undergoing a shift from grassland to tree dominance or the opposite. Therefore, exploring themechanism of tree-grass coexistence and studying how ecosystems respond to environmental changeare critical to understanding such shift. We construct a tree-grass-water model by considering the Wal-ters two layer hypothesis, i.e., the grass species only access to the shallow soil water, while the treecan uptake both the shallow and deep soil water. Results show that the tree-grass coexistence regionincreases with increasing their niche separation. Hence, the vertical niche separation between trees andgrass with respect to limiting water resources might be one of mechanisms for tree-grass coexistence.Besides, both tree and grass display positive responses to precipitation, but surprisingly, there exists acatastrophe that the mean vegetation density first rapidly increases, but then quickly decreases as pre-cipitation increases in the tree-grass-water model with infiltration feedback. Most likely, this catastropheis due primarily to the periodical fluctuation of vegetation density and water caused by its intrinsic infil-tration feedback. Overall, our study provides new insights into the dynamics of tree-grass in arid andsemi-arid ecosystems. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Ecological modelling. - Amsterdam
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Publication
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Amsterdam
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2017
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ISSN
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0304-3800
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DOI
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10.1016/J.ECOLMODEL.2017.07.014
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Volume/pages
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360
(2017)
, p. 387-398
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ISI
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000411771800035
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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Full text (open access)
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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