Environmental fluctuations in a neutral framework explain community statics and dynamics

Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory as a prominent example. However, while successful in explaining static patterns such as species abundance distributions, the neutral theory was criticized for making unrealistic predictions of fundamental dynamic patterns. In particular, the theory predicts unrealistically long times to extinction of species, and too small population fluctuations. Moreover, the predictions of the theory are extremely sensitive to the assumption that all species have equal fitness. We tested whether incorporating environmental fluctuations into the neutral framework (i.e. species have fluctuating fitness, but are equivalent on the long run) could resolve these limitations.