title: Self-organization of plants in a dryland ecosystem: Symmetry breaking and critical cluster size.
abstract: Periodical patterns of vegetation in an arid or semiarid ecosystem are described using statistical mechanics and Monte Carlo numerical simulation technique. Plants are characterized by the area that each individual occupies and a facilitation-competition pairwise interaction. Assuming that external resources (precipitation, solar radiation, nutrients, etc.) are available to the ecosystem, it is possible to obtain the persistent configurations of plants compatible with an equitable distribution of resources maximizing the Shannon entropy. Variation of vegetation patterns with density, critical cluster size, and facilitation distance are predicted. Morphological changes of clusters are shown to be a function of the external resources. As a final remark, it is proposed that an early warning of desertification could be detected from the coefficient of variation of the mean cluster size together with the distribution of cluster sizes.
authors.affiliation: IFLYSIB (UNLP, CONICET), 59 No. 789, B1900BTE La Plata, Argentina.
authors.forename: Ariel G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Meyra
authors.affiliation: IFLYSIB (UNLP, CONICET), 59 No. 789, B1900BTE La Plata, Argentina.|Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina.|Diseño Industrial, Facultad de Bellas Artes, UNLP, La Plata, Argentina.
authors.forename: Guillermo J
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Zarragoicoechea
authors.affiliation: IFLYSIB (UNLP, CONICET), 59 No. 789, B1900BTE La Plata, Argentina.
authors.forename: Victor A
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Kuz
mesh_terms: D003889:Desert Climate; D004435:Eating; D017753:Ecosystem; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D063245:Plant Development