Biodiversity enhancement induced by environmental noise

Recent research in ecology has concentrated on the effect of environmental changes on ecosystem structure and function. In most cases the focus has been on how ecosystems respond to changes in the mean values of environmental parameters, while the impact of changes in the variance has seldom been studied. However, changes in environmental variability may be important. For example, recent climate change predictions indicate that, in addition to trends in the mean values of climate variables, an increase in interannual variability is expected to occur in the near future. How will this increase in the variance of environmental parameters affect the dynamics of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems? Environmental fluctuations are usually believed to play a “destructive role” in ecosystem dynamics and to act as a source of disturbance, which perturbs the state of a system. However, noise is also known for its “constructive role”, i.e., for the ability to create new ordered states in dynamical systems. Here we show that environmental noise may also enhance biodiversity. To this end we develop a conceptual model to show how random environmental fluctuations may favor biodiversity. Noise-induced biodiversity is observed for moderate levels of noise intensity, while it disappears with stronger environmental fluctuations, consistently with the notion underlying the “intermediate disturbance hypothesis”.