Phase transition in a dryland shrub-grass ecosystem: Emergence through local trade-offs.

Dryland shrub-grass ecosystems show three phase-transition hallmarks—abrupt desert/shrubland/grassland shifts, Turing-like patterning, and threshold-linked phenomena—unified by an extensive–intensive (EI) foraging trade-off.

• Why it matters: The work addresses how bottom-up local interactions generate cross-scale emergent states and critical transitions, a key gap in linking ecological complexity to formal theory.
• What they did: The authors combine empirical evidence with a cellular automaton model whose local rules encode an EI trade-off, and they validate this trade-off using plant functional traits and spatial patch patterns.
• The result: The model and data jointly indicate that EI trade-offs integrate multiple observed transition behaviors, enabling phase-transition theory to support understanding, predicting, and managing dryland ecosystem complexity.

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