A flow-kick model of dryland vegetation patterns: the impact of rainfall variability on resilience

Abstract: In many drylands around the globe, vegetation self-organizes into regular spatial patterns in response to aridity stress. We consider the regularly-spaced vegetation bands, on gentle hill-slopes, that survive low rainfall conditions by harvesting additional stormwater from upslope low-infiltration bare zones. We are interested in the robustness of this pattern formation survival mechanism to changes in rainfall variability. For this, we use a flow-kick modeling framework that treats storms as instantaneous kicks to the soil water. The positive feedbacks in the storm-level hydrology, that act to concentrate water within the vegetation bands, are captured through the spatial profiles of the soil water kicks. Between storms, the soil water and vegetation, modeled by a two-component reaction-diffusion system, evolve together. We use a combination of linear stability analysis and numerical simulation to compare predictions of idealized periodic rainfall, with no variability, to predictions when there is randomness in the timing and magnitude of water input from storms. We show that including these random elements leads to a decrease in the parameter range over which patterns appear. This suggests that an increase in storm variability, even with the same mean annual rainfall, may negatively impact the resilience of these pattern-forming dryland ecosystems.