Curvature and confinement: robustness of dryland vegetation patterns on sloped, undulating terrain

Abstract

We consider a topographic extension to the well known Klausmeier model describing vegetation on sloped undulating terrain with a primary uphill direction and perpendicular small amplitude undulation forming ridges and valleys. Previous studies of this system have shown that, like 1-dimensional sloped terrain, as rainfall levels decrease through a threshold, vegetation forms into patterned states consisting of bands or stripes which are transverse to the primary upslope direction and move slowly uphill. In this paper we investigate the links between undulation amplitude and pattern dynamics, with the goal of understanding how the terrain impacts the resilience of the vegetation. To do this we take advantage of features of the domain, the ridge and valley, to reduce the analysis to two related 1-dimensional problems. Using a combination of analysis and numerical simulations, we argue that a combination of the ridge and valley equations provide insight to the full 2-dimensional dynamics. In particular, we find that at small undulation, the ridge plays a critical role in determining the existence and stability of patterns. For undulation amplitudes smaller than a well-defined threshold, the added sensitivity of vegetation on the ridge to aridity stress causes vegetation to be less resilient than indicated by uniformly sloped models. For undulation amplitudes above this threshold, vegetation is able to survive longer by becoming localized in the valleys, but the amplitude must be increased further to mitigate the original detrimental effects.