Download or read book A Stochastic Model for Water-Vegetation Systems and the Effect of Decreasing Precipitation on Semi-Arid Environments written by Shannon A. Dixon and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current climate change trends are affecting the magnitude and recurrence of extreme weather events. In particular, several semi-arid regions around the planet are confronting more intense and prolonged lack of precipitation, slowly transforming these regions into deserts. In this thesis we present a stochastic (meso-scale) model for vegetation-precipitation interactions for semi-arid landscapes. Extensive simulations with the model suggest that persistence in current trends of precipitation decline in semi-arid landscapes may expedite desertification processes by up to several decades.