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).