Have researchers found the missing link that explains the mysterious phenomenon known as fairy circles?
After years of research and unsatisfactory alternative explanations, Prof. Ehud Meron and his colleagues believe pairing spatial patterning and phenotypic changes provides the answer
2023-12-11
(Press-News.org) BEER-SHEVA, Israel, December 11, 2023 – Fairy circles, a nearly hexagonal pattern of bare-soil circular gaps in grasslands, initially observed in Namibia and later in other parts of the world, have fascinated and baffled scientists for years. Theories for their appearance range from spatial self-organization induced by scale-dependent water-vegetation feedback to pre-existing patterns of termite nests.
Prof. Ehud Meron of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has been studying the Namibian fairy circles as a case study for understanding how ecosystems respond to water stress. He believes that all theories to date have overlooked the coupling between two robust mechanisms essential for understanding ecosystem response: phenotypic plasticity at the level of a single plant, and spatial self-organization in vegetation patterns at the level of a plant population. Phenotypic plasticity is the plant's ability to change its own traits in response to environmental stresses.
Prof. Meron, together with his postdoctoral fellows, Jamie Bennett, Bidesh Bera, and Michel Ferré, and his colleagues, Profs. Hezi Yizhaq and Stephan Getzin, propose a novel model that captures both spatial patterning by a scale-dependent water-vegetation feedback and phenotypic changes involving deep-root growth to reach a moister soil layer. By comparing model predictions with empirical observations, they show that the coupling between these two mechanisms is the key to resolving two outstanding puzzles that the classical theory of vegetation pattern formation fails to explain: the appearance of multi-scale fairy-circle patterns, where the matrix in between the fairy circles consists of small-scale vegetation spots, and the absence of stripe and spot patterns, besides gap patterns, along the rainfall gradient, as the classical theory predicts.
Furthermore, they find that the combination of plant-level phenotypic changes and population-level spatial patterning can result in many additional pathways of ecosystem response to water stress, resulting in different multi-scale patterns, all of which are significantly more resilient to water stress than those involving a single phenotype.
Their findings were published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"Identifying these alternative pathways is essential for shifting fragile ecosystems on tracks to collapse to pathways of resilience,” explains Prof. Meron, who recently won an ERC Synergy Grant to study resilience pathways in drylands and other biomes. “This study highlights the importance of considering more elements of ecosystem complexity when addressing how to evade tipping to dysfunctional ecosystem states as warmer and drier climates develop,” Prof. Meron concludes.
The Israel Science Foundation supported this research under grants no. 1053/17 and 2167/21.
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2023-12-11
WASHINGTON (Dec. 11, 2023)--A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus provides a better understanding of how the brain responds to injuries. Researchers at the George Washington University discovered that a protein called Snail plays a key role in coordinating the response of brain cells after an injury.
The study shows that after an injury to the central nervous system (CNS) a group of localized cells start to produce Snail, a transcription factor or protein that has been implicated in the repair process.The GW researchers show that changing how much Snail is produced can significantly affect whether the injury starts ...
2023-12-11
About The Study: In participants with obesity or overweight, withdrawing tirzepatide led to substantial regain of lost weight, whereas continued treatment maintained and augmented initial weight reduction in this randomized clinical trial that included 670 adults.
Authors: Louis J. Aronne, M.D., of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jama.2023.24945)
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict ...
2023-12-11
Lymphatic fluid from surgical drains, which is usually tossed in the trash, is a treasure in the hands of University of Pittsburgh and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis researchers who found that this liquid could inform more precise treatments for patients with head and neck cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV).
The new study, published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, shows for the first time that HPV DNA in lymphatic fluid collected ...
2023-12-11
INDIANAPOLIS -- LOINC® and Health Data Standards at Regenstrief Institute has received a $4.4 million grant from the Regenstrief Foundation to support expansion of work on a global initiative to categorize and standardize social determinants of health (SDOH) information into electronic health records (EHRs), an ambitious project to integrate social needs data into clinical care to more effectively address health inequities.
The unequal distribution of income, food, safety and access to healthcare are recognized as root causes of health disparities. But, currently, data on these factors are rarely well documented within a patient’s ...
2023-12-11
Frontline nurses who learned the Transcendental Meditation® (TM®) technique during the COVID-19 pandemic showed rapid and significant improvements in flourishing, PTSD, anxiety, and burnout over 3 months compared to controls, according to a study published today in the Journal of Nursing Administration.
The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of Transcendental Meditation on nurses’ multidimensional well-being, conceptualized as the presence of flourishing and the absence of PTSD, anxiety, and burnout.
A total of 104 nurses in three Florida hospitals participated. ...
2023-12-11
Intimate partner violence is widespread and can have severe physical and psychological health repercussions, but there is a shortage of research on reliable predictors of abuse before it occurs. New research, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, identifies several warning signs that preceded and predicted intimate partner violence.
“Although future research is required to fully understand the associations between warning signs and abuse, these red flags could eventually be used ...
2023-12-11
It may feel unforgivably rude to reject an invitation – even one to an event you would much prefer not to attend – but people often overestimate the social consequences of saying no, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
“I was once invited to an event that I absolutely did not want to attend, but I attended anyways because I was nervous that the person who invited me would be upset if I did not – and that appears to be a common experience,” said lead author Julian Givi, PhD, an assistant professor at West Virginia University. “Our research shows, however, ...
2023-12-11
Considerable attention has focused on mental illness as a major contributor to homicides in the United States. Serious mental illness affects more than 14 million Americans ages 18 and older and nearly 58 million people reported having a mental illness.
In 2021, 47,286 Americans died from gun violence – the highest ever – of which 46 percent were homicides and 54 percent were suicides involving firearms.
Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine and collaborators compared deaths from mental illness and gun violence in the U.S., Australia and the United Kingdom and their clinical ...
2023-12-11
As holidays near, people are sneaking shakes of their presents to try to figure out what they’re getting. But present shakers might be a little less sly than they think. New research shows it’s incredibly easy for people watching others shake boxes to tell what they’re up to.
“There are few things more delightful than seeing a child’s eyes light up as they pick up a present and wonder what might be inside,” said author Chaz Firestone, a Johns Hopkins University assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences who investigates ...
2023-12-11
Some Covid-19 vaccines safely and effectively used lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to deliver messenger RNA to cells. A new MIT study shows that different nanoparticles could be used for a potential Alzheimer’s disease (AD) therapy. In tests in multiple mouse models and with cultured human cells, a newly tailored LNP formulation effectively delivered small interfering RNA (siRNA) to the brain’s microglia immune cells to suppress expression of a protein linked to excessive inflammation in Alzheimer’s ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Have researchers found the missing link that explains the mysterious phenomenon known as fairy circles?
After years of research and unsatisfactory alternative explanations, Prof. Ehud Meron and his colleagues believe pairing spatial patterning and phenotypic changes provides the answer
