How the storage effect and the number of temporal niches affect biodiversity in stochastic and seasonal environments
Fig 2
The relationships between the mean time to extinction T and the size of the community, N, in different scenarios.
Filled red circles were obtained from Monte-Carlo simulations, Blue circles are theoretical predictions based on numerical integration of Eq (8) with the μ(x) and σ2(x) from Eqs (9)–(12), and the dashed black line is a linear fit to these blue circles, presented to guide the eye. As expected, in the global-periodic case the mean time to extinction grows exponentially with N, in the global-periodic the grows satisfies a power-law, the local-periodic case behaves like the neutral model (T is linear in N), whereas the local-stochastic dynamics yields log2 N growth. In all cases s0 = 0 (so the T shown here is the mean time to extinction starting from x = 1/2), δ = 0.2 and γ = 0.4.