Antagonistic effects of long- and short-term environmental variation on species coexistence.

ABSTRACT: Assessing the impact of environmental fluctuations on species coexistence is critical for understanding biodiversity loss and the ecological impacts of climate change. Yet determining how properties like the intensity, frequency or duration of environmental fluctuations influence species coexistence remains challenging, presumably because previous studies have focused on indefinite coexistence. Here, we model the impact of environmental fluctuations at different temporal scales on species coexistence over a finite time period by employing the concepts of time-windowed averaging and performance curves to incorporate temporal niche differences within a stochastic Lotka-Volterra model. We discover that short- and long-term environmental variability has contrasting effects on transient species

SUBMITTER: Liu M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8424298 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature