Abstract
A growing body of empirical evidence supporting or opposing the mechanistic hypotheses and predictions of self-organization models exist which have been applied to the case of spatially periodic vegetation patterns found in semi-arid and arid areas around hot deserts in Africa. Overall, remarkable qualitative – and sometimes quantitative – agreement is found and presented here between the rich theoretical framework and predictions of self-organization models and the results of field and remotely sensed investigations for dryland areas in Niger, Morocco and Sudan.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by FNRS and FRIA grants. The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the ECOPAS project of the European Union (Niger) and the Laboratory of Biology of the University Abdou Moumouni of Niamey. SPOT imagery was provided by the European OASIS project. CNES 2001 – Spot Image distribution. This chapter is a contribution to the book Patterns of Land Degradation in Drylands: Understanding Self-Organised Ecogeomorphic Systems, which is the outcome of an ESF-funded Exploratory Workshop – “Self-organised ecogeomorphic systems: confronting models with data for land degradation in drylands” – which was held in Potsdam, Germany, 7–10 June 2010.
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Barbier, N., Couteron, P., Deblauwe, V. (2014). Case Study of Self-Organized Vegetation Patterning in Dryland Regions of Central Africa. In: Mueller, E., Wainwright, J., Parsons, A., Turnbull, L. (eds) Patterns of Land Degradation in Drylands. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5727-1_13
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