How inertia affects autotoxicity-mediated vegetation dynamics: from close-to to far-from-equilibrium patterns

Abstract

In this work, the influence of inertial effects on the formation and evolution of vegetation patterns on sloped arid terrains is investigated from the onset of instability to far-from-equilibrium. Analyses are carried out in a hyperbolic extension of the one-dimensional Klausmeier model, where autotoxicity effects are also taken into account. As the system moves away from the wave bifurcation threshold, two classes of solutions arise: small-amplitude periodic migrating bands near onset and large-amplitude travelling pulses in far-from-equilibrium conditions. For the first class, results of LSA reveal that inertia has a twofold role at onset: it acts as a destabilising mechanism, thereby enlarging the parameter region in which uphill migrating vegetation bands can emerge, and it reduces the pattern migration speed. Its role also manifests itself close to onset, as proved by the Stuart-Landau equation for the pattern amplitude deduced via multiple-scale WNA. Indeed, it is shown that inertial effects may reverse the dynamical regime, from supercritical to subcritical, thus leading to hysteresis. For the second class of solutions, the travelling vegetation pulses are first captured via numerical simulations and then investigated via Geometric Singular Perturbation Theory (GSPT). In far-from-equilibrium conditions, inertia is shown to increase pulse speed while preserving the intrinsic multiscale structure of the solution, in full agreement with the numerical findings. Overall, the proposed combined analytical-numerical investigations have depicted several ecological scenarios as a function of the distance from the instability threshold, elucidating that inertia does not exclusively act as a time lag.