Climate change affects ecosystems worldwide by disrupting the balance between biotic communities and the abiotic factors that sustain them. These changes in environmental conditions alter the hierarchy of ecosystem-shaping mechanisms, driving the spatial reorganisation of vegetation and resources. Vegetation pattern formation refers to the self-organisation of plant communities into distinct spatial arrangements, arising from interactions among plants and environmental factors such as resource availability and ecosystem feedback. These patterns play a crucial role in improving the management of resources such as water and soil nutrients, particularly in vulnerable regions such as arid and semi-arid landscapes. Understanding these patterns is thus vital to gaining insights into ecosystem functioning, feedback mechanisms, and how drylands will respond to ongoing climate change. However, the ecological significance of vegetation patterns in water-limited ecosystems remains unclear. For several years theoretical models suggested that vegetation patterns could serve as indicators of ongoing desertification processes, with vegetation spots preceding tipping into a desert state. More recent theoretical progress, however, has hypothesised that patterns could provide ecosystems with a route to prevent tipping by limiting the impact of external stresses to a spatially local scale. This session invites contributions that study vegetation pattern formation using a range of approaches, including mathematical modelling, data-driven and machine learning techniques, as well as ground-based or remote sensing observations. The aim is to foster dialogue and collaboration between theoretical and empirical research, facilitating a deeper integration of theory with measurement and working towards resolving existing discrepancies in the theoretical literature.