Does wind affect the orientation of vegetation stripes? A copula-based mixture model for axial and circular data

Abstract

Motivated by a case study of vegetation patterns, we introduce a mixture model with concomitant variables to examine the association between the orientation of vegetation stripes and wind direction. The proposal relies on a novel copula-based bivariate distribution for mixed axial and circular observations and provides a parsimonious and computationally tractable approach to examine the dependence of two environmental variables observed in a complex manifold. The findings suggest that dominant winds shape the orientation of vegetation stripes through a mechanism of neighbouring plants providing wind shelter to downwind individuals.