From above, it looks like the fur of a big cat. Vegetation and barren land array to form tiger stripes and leopard spots in the dry landscape surrounding Niamey, Niger. These types of patterns are ...

Vegetation in semi-arid environments (or regions with low rainfall) self-organizes into patterns or "bands." Banded vegetation is common where there is low rainfall. Scientists have used a ...

This Special Feature of the Journal of Vegetation Science contains ten contributions from the 56th Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), which was held in Tartu, ...

Be it the Mima mounds of Washington state or the famous "fairy circles" of Namibia in southwestern Africa, people are captivated by the regular patterns of plant growth that blanket desert and ...

On a cold, rainy January morning in a café in downtown Chicago, I met Mary Silber, a leading scientist who applies mathematics to understand repetitive patterns of vegetation, which alternate ...

Vegetation restoration during old-field succession was studied in an alpine Andean ecosystem (paramo). 123 plots with different fallow times (1 to 12 years) and 8 plots under natural vegetation were ...

If you've ever traveled through drylands, you may have noticed striking vegetation patterns—stripes, spots, or rings—scattered across otherwise barren landscapes. From "tiger bush" in West Africa to ...

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 ...