Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 23, Issue 2, Pages 274-282Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.13430
Keywords
Coexistence; environmental stochasticity; invasibility; lottery model; mean growth rate; mean time to extinction; modern coexistence theory; persistence
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Funding
- ISF-NRF Singapore joint research program [2669/17, WBS R-154-000-B09-281]
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The coexistence of many species within ecological communities poses a long-standing theoretical puzzle. Modern coexistence theory (MCT) and related techniques explore this phenomenon by examining the chance of a species population growing from rarity in the presence of all other species. The mean growth rate when rare, E[r], is used in MCT as a metric that measures persistence properties (like invasibility or time to extinction) of a population. Here we critique this reliance on E[r] and show that it fails to capture the effect of temporal random abundance variations on persistence properties. The problem becomes particularly severe when an increase in the amplitude of stochastic temporal environmental variations leads to an increase in E[r], since at the same time it enhances random abundance fluctuations and the two effects are inherently intertwined. In this case, the chance of invasion and the mean extinction time of a population may even go down as E[r] increases.
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