TY - JOUR TI - Linking spatial self-organization to community assembly and biodiversity AU - Bera, Bidesh K AU - Tzuk, Omer AU - Bennett, Jamie JR AU - Meron, Ehud A2 - Schmid, Bernhard A2 - Weigel, Detlef VL - 10 PY - 2021 DA - 2021/09/27 SP - e73819 C1 - eLife 2021;10:e73819 DO - 10.7554/eLife.73819 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.73819 AB - 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. KW - plant communities KW - vegetation pattern formation KW - trait-based approach KW - community structure KW - response to climate change JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -