Generalized Lotka-Volterra Systems with Time Correlated Stochastic Interactions

Abstract: In this work, we explore the dynamics of species abundances within ecological communities using the Generalized Lotka-Volterra (GLV) model. At variance with previous approaches, we present an analysis of stochastic GLV dynamics with temporal fluctuations in interaction strengths between species. We develop a dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) tailored for scenarios with annealed colored noise and simple functional responses. We show that time-dependent interactions can be effectively modeled as environmental noise in the DMFT and we obtain analytical predictions for the species abundance distribution that well matches empirical observations. Our results suggest that environmental noise favors species coexistence and allows to overcome the complexity-stability paradox, especially in comparison to dynamics with quenched disorder. This study offers new insights not only into the modeling of large ecosystem dynamics, but also proposes novel methodologies for examining ecological systems.