Role of Spatiotemporal Noise in the Growth and Stability of Ecosystems

Large ecological communities with many interacting species are predicted to be unstable, yet natural ecosystems maintain remarkable diversity. I will discuss how environmental fluctuations that vary across space and time can help address this apparent contradiction. By extending classical population models to include both dispersal and environmental noise, we find that neither process alone ensures stability, but together they generate an effective nonlinear self-regulation that permits the coexistence of arbitrarily many species. Analytical results supported by simulations reveal a transition between extinction and coexistence phases and link these collective dynamics to anomalous scaling laws known from single-species growth on noisy seascapes. These results suggest that environmental variability, rather than being detrimental, can act as a constructive organizing principle that promotes diversity in complex ecosystems.