The discovery of nearly periodic vegetation patterns in arid and semi-arid regionsmotivated numerous model studies in the past decade. Most studies have focused onvegetation pattern formation, and on the response of vegetation patterns to gradients ofthe limiting water resource. The reciprocal question, what resource modifications areinduced by vegetation pattern formation, which is essential to the understanding ofdryland landscapes, has hardly been addressed. This paper is a synthetic review of modelstudies that address this question and the consequent implications for inter-specificplant interactions and species diversity. It focuses both on patch and landscape scales,highlighting bottom-up processes, where plant interactions at the patch scale give rise tospatial patterns at the landscape scale, and top-down processes, where pattern transitionsat the landscape scale affect inter-specific interactions at the patch scale.
