Spatial processes often drive ecosystem processes, read more biogeochemical cycles, and land-atmosphere feedbacks at the landscape-scale.Climate-sensitive disturbances, such as fire, land-use change, pests, and pathogens, often spread contagiously across the landscape.While the climate-change implications of these factors are often discussed, none of these processes are incorporated into earth system models as contagious disturbances because they occur at a spatial scale well below model resolution.
Here we present a novel second-order spatially-implicit scheme for representing the size distribution of spatially contagious disturbances.We demonstrate a means for dynamically evolving spatial adjacency through time in response to disturbance.Our scheme shows that contagious disturbance types can be characterized as here a function of their size and edge-to-interior ratio.
This emergent disturbance characterization allows for description of disturbance across scales.This scheme lays the ground for a more realistic global-scale exploration of how spatially-complex disturbances interact with climate-change drivers, and forwards theoretical understanding of spatial and temporal evolution of disturbance.