I'm doing research on patterns of plants in semi-arid areas. There are theories that water-stressed plants will organize themselves into striping and mazing patterns to better collect runoff from rare rainstorms. There are known examples in Africa and Australia, but I can't find much in the scientific literature from North America.

Has anybody seen anything like this? I'd like to find some sites that I can travel to, and which might have good available aerial photography, so I'm especially looking for the US. I've found a couple of possible study sites that have kind-of sort-of patterns. If anyone can recommend anything better I'd love to see it (and acknowledge your name in any papers I manage to publish).

There's some known examples in the attached .kmz file, plus my own current sites.

A decent example from northern Mexico:



A so-so example from Arizona:



Note that the vegetation (probably) isn't being directly organized by the landform: it isn't just shadowing the ridges or following natural runoff channels or soil patterns. As each tree or bush grows, it modifies the surrounding microhabitat, adjusting the chances of other plants growing in certain nearby locations. It's a kind of self-organized emergent pattern that appears at the landscape level from the individual interactions of all the plants. At least that's the theory. Cool, yes?

How about creosote rings? The growth pattern may serve to do more than expose the growing plants to new soil. See this post and this post.

Thanks for replying Hill. Creosote rings seem like a great example of a plant which makes patterns at the level of the individual. What I'm particularly interested in is patterns that are formed from groups of plants together.

In the first example you linked to, the surrounding plants look to be almost totally randomly distributed across the landscape, which makes a useful counter-example!

Possibly the larger plants there are random, while some of the smaller plants, which are almost too small for the resolution of the photo, might have some organization. I'm hoping to create automated measures of the randomness of the vegetation in landscapes. It would be interesting if smaller plants were organized spatially, while larger plants were random. Different dynamics at different scales.