Understanding how drylands respond to ongoing environmental change is extremely
important for global sustainability. In this review, we discuss how biotic attributes, climate …

Highly organized vegetation patterns can be found in a number of landscapes around the
world. In recent years, several authors have investigated the processes underlying …

A number of ecosystems can exhibit abrupt shifts between alternative stable states. Because
of their important ecological and economic consequences, recent research has focused on …

The response of drylands to environmental gradients can be abrupt rather than gradual.
These shifts largely occur unannounced and are difficult to reverse once they happen; their …

A significant part of this book is based on a graduate course on pattern formation which I
have been teaching during the past two decades in the Physics Department at Ben-Gurion …

Randomness is ubiquitous in nature. Random drivers are generally considered a source of
disorder in environmental systems. However, the interaction between noise and nonlinear …

Self-organization processes leading to pattern formation phenomena are ubiquitous in
nature. Intensive theoretical and experimental research efforts during the past few decades …

Transitions between regimes with radically different properties are ubiquitous in nature.
Such transitions can occur either smoothly or in an abrupt and catastrophic fashion …

Spatially periodic vegetation patterns in arid to semi‐arid regions have inspired numerous
mechanistic models in the last decade. All embody a common principle of self‐organization …

Ecosystem regime shifts are regarded as abrupt global transitions from one stable state to
an alternative stable state, induced by slow environmental changes or by global …