Spatiotemporal noise stabilizes unbounded diversity in strongly competitive communities.

Spatiotemporal environmental noise enables unlimited stable coexistence in highly competitive communities despite disordered interactions.

• Why it matters: Understanding how diverse ecological communities remain stable challenges classical models that predict instability with high diversity. Addressing this gap can explain the persistent biodiversity observed in nature.
• What they did: The study extends the generalized Lotka-Volterra model to incorporate spatial structure and environmental fluctuations, analyzing how combined noise influences community stability and diversity.
• The result: Spatiotemporal noise induces power-law abundance fluctuations and emergent sublinear self-inhibition, allowing arbitrarily many species to coexist stably and resolving the diversity-stability paradox.