Environmental variation can both promote and inhibit
species coexistence
Given that long-term environmental variation tends to hinder species
coexistence and short-term variation tends to facilitate coexistence,
what happens when environmental fluctuation occurs over both short- and
long-term scales (e.g. environmental temperature can vary at daily,
monthly, and yearly temporal scales)? Here, we alter the pattern of both
long- and short-term temperature variation simultaneously (Fig. 3d-i),
generating a “coexistence-exclusion-coexistence” pattern where
variability first inhibits coexistence but then promotes it when
variability becomes even greater (Fig. 3a-c).