Lotka Volterra in fluctuating environment or "how switching between beneficial environments can make survival harder"

TL;DR

This paper studies two-species Lotka-Volterra models in fluctuating environments, revealing that switching between beneficial environments can unexpectedly cause species extinction or coexistence, depending on the switching dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic framework analyzing how environmental switching impacts species persistence, highlighting counterintuitive outcomes in ecological models.

Findings

Switching can lead to species extinction despite favorable conditions.

Environmental fluctuations can promote coexistence of species.

The results depend on the switching rates and environmental states.

Abstract

We consider two dimensional Lotka-Volterra systems in fluctuating environment. Relying on recent results on stochastic persistence and piecewise deterministic Markov processes, we show that random switching between two environments both favorable to the same species can lead to the extinction of this species or coexistence of the species.