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Speaker: Annalisa Iuorio, Parthenope University Naples
Title: The impact of autotoxicity on vegetation dynamics: a mathematical and ecological overview
Abstract: Understanding vegetation dynamics, particularly the mechanisms leading to the emergence of several types of vegetation patterns in different environments, is a crucial goal of our time. Such structures, in fact, are not simply interesting from the theoretical viewpoint, but also play a major role in preserving ecosystems’ resilience by being important ecological indicators of their “fitness”. In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to the influence of so-called autotoxicity on the dynamics of living organisms - including vegetation. This has opened the door for new, biologically feasible explanations of experimental observations known to theoretical and applied ecologists which were hard to justify by means of “standard” models focusing only on the interplay between biomass and water dynamics.