Water Limitation and Negative Plant-soil Feedback Explain Vegetation Patterns along Rainfall Gradient

The formation of vegetation patterns has been widely studied and discussed over the years and it has been related to two different mechanisms: depletion of water in the center of vegetation patches and production of toxicity by the decomposition of plant residues in soil. In this work we present a spatially explicit model that combines these two processes showing that negative plant-soil feedbacks can explain the development of different vegetation patterns also when water is not a limiting factor. This also demonstrates that the toxicity effects may change the stability properties of the vegetation patterns.