• Speaker: Damià Gomila Researcher at the IFISC (CSIC-UIB).

Esporles, May 14, 2018. Posidonia Oceanica is a marine clonal plant of capital importance in the Mediterranean sea. It forms extensive meadows which provide important ecosystem services. Close to the cost such meadows are not uniform but display a variety of spatial patterns.

In this seminar I will show a simply model for clonal growth able to reproduce the diversity of seascapes observed in these ecosystems as emerging from plant interactions within the meadow. These seascapes include two extreme cases, a continuous meadow and a bare landscape, along with intermediate states that range from the occurrence of persistent but isolated fairy circles, or dissipative solitons, to seascapes with multiple gaps, banded vegetation, and leopard skin patterns consisting of bare soil dotted with plant patches. The different seascapes observed hold diagnostic power as to proximity of seagrass meadows to extinction points.

Date and Time: Thursday, May 24, 12:00h

Place: IMEDEA Seminar Room

Source: IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB)