Vegetation patterning in water-limited and other resource-limited ecosystems highlights spatial self-organization processes as potentially key drivers of community assembly. These processes provide insight into predictable landscape-level relationships between organisms and their abiotic environment in the form of regular and irregular patterns of biota and resources. However, two aspects have largely been overlooked; the roles played by plant – soil-biota feedbacks and allelopathy in spatial self-organization, and their potential contribution, along with plant-resource feedbacks, to community assembly through spatial self-organization. Here, we expand the drivers of spatial self-organization from a focus on plant-resource feedbacks to include plant – soil-biota feedbacks and allelopathy, and integrate concepts of nonlinear physics and community ecology to generate a new hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, below-ground processes can affect community assemblages through two types of spatial self-organization, global and local. The former occurs simultaneously across whole ecosystems, leading to self-organized patterns of biota, allelochemicals and resources, and niche partitioning. The latter occurs locally in ecotones, and determines ecotone structure and motion, invasion dynamics, and species coexistence. Studies of the two forms of spatial self-organization are important for understanding the organization of plant communities in drier climates which are likely to involve spatial patterning or re-patterning. Such studies are also important for developing new practices of ecosystem management, based on local manipulations at ecotones, to slow invasion dynamics or induce transitions from transitive to intransitive networks of interspecific interactions which increase species diversity.

水资源有限和其他资源有限的生态系统中的植被模式突出了空间自组织过程作为社区集结的潜在关键驱动因素。这些过程以生物群和资源的规则和不规则模式的形式提供了对生物与其非生物环境之间可预测的景观水平关系的洞察。然而，有两个方面在很大程度上被忽视了：植物-土壤-生物群反馈和化感作用在空间自组织中所起的作用，以及它们与植物-资源反馈一起通过空间自组织对群落组装的潜在贡献。在这里，我们将空间自组织的驱动力从关注植物-资源反馈扩展到包括植物-土壤-生物群反馈和化感作用，并整合非线性物理学和群落生态学的概念以产生新的假设。根据这一假设，地下过程可以通过两种类型的空间自组织，全球和本地影响社区组合。前者在整个生态系统中同时发生，导致生物群、化感化学物质和资源的自组织模式以及生态位划分。后者在交错带局部发生，并决定了交错带的结构和运动、入侵动态和物种共存。研究这两种空间自组织形式对于了解可能涉及空间模式或重新模式的干燥气候中植物群落的组织非常重要。这些研究对于开发生态系统管理的新做法也很重要，