Self-organized hummock-hollow patterns redistribute salinity stress in coastal meadows

Self-organization theory predicts that ecosystem functioning and resilience can emerge from feedbacks that generate spatial patterns. These emergent properties have commonly been explained by local positive feedbacks that concentrate limiting resources within productive patches. Here, we identify a stress-redistribution feedback underlying self-organized hummock-hollow patterning. Through this feedback, salinity stress is partitioned across the patterned landscape, maintaining vegetated hummocks as low-salinity refugia alongside salt-rich hollows and thereby sustaining ecosystem functioning under climate-related salinization. A spatially explicit model predicts that rain-driven salt redistribution lowers hummocks salinity, increases productivity, and enhances resilience to a salt pulse. Field and remote-sensing data support these predictions: Patterned hummocks have lower soil salinity, higher biomass, greater reproductive output, and prolonged phenological activity compared with adjacent homogeneous vegetation. Together, these results reveal that spatial self-organization can support ecosystem functioning and resilience under climate stress through an underappreciated mechanism: the spatial redistribution of environmental stress. Restoring such self-organized patterning may offer a promising strategy for sustaining ecosystems in a changing climate.