Mean growth rate when rare is not a reliable metric for persistence of species

The coexistence of many species within ecological communities poses a long-standing theoretical puzzle. Modern coexistence theory (MCT) and related techniques explore this phenomenon by examining the chance of a species population growing from rarity in the presence of all other species. The mean growth rate when rare, E[r] , is used in MCT as a metric that measures persistence properties (like invasibility or time to extinction) of a...