Abstract
Regular pattern is a typical feature of vegetation distribution and thus it is important to study the law of vegetation evolution in the fields of desertification and environment conservation. The saturated water absorption effect between the soil water and vegetation plays an crucial role in the vegetation patterns in semi-arid regions, yet its influence on vegetation dynamics is largely ignored. In this paper, we pose a vegetation-water model with saturated water absorption effect of vegetation. Our results show that the parameter 1/P, which is conversion coefficient of water absorption, has a great impact on pattern formation of vegetation: with the increase of P, the density of vegetation decrease, and meanwhile it can induce the transition of different patterns structures. In addition, we find that the increase of appropriate precipitation can postpone the time on the phase transition of the vegetation pattern. The obtained results systematically reveal the effect of saturated water absorption on vegetation systems which well enrich the findings in vegetation dynamics and thus may provide some new insights for vegetation protection.
Highlights
In nature, vegetation is very widely distributed in different places all over the world
The desertification phenomenon is austere, so it is the fundamental way for people to understand the cause of desertification correctly to master the law of vegetation evolution [35, 36]
We show the effect of saturated water absorption on the vegetation dynamics based on a mathematical model in the form of reaction-diffusion equations
Summary
Vegetation is very widely distributed in different places all over the world. In 1999, Klausmeier firstly proposed the classical vegetated-water model, explaining the regular stripes on the slopes and irregular mosaics on the ground, and pointed out that nonlinear mechanisms play a major role in determining the spatial structure of plant communities [19]. In 2017, Zhang et al proposed a vegetation-soil model and explained that wind can induce the generation of vegetation spot pattern These models do not take into account that vegetation water absorption is not immoderate [21]. Many types of vegetation have a saturation effect when absorbing water [27,28,29,30], which is generally not well studied by scientists This saturated water absorption may have great influences of the vegetation pattern.
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