Fig 2. Forward convergence in the lottery model.

Lines of the same color but different intensity represent the same species with different initial conditions. Although starting at very different values, the effect of the initial conditions has all but disappeared by midway through the simulation. The environmental fluctuations driving this lottery simulation are lognormal, independent between species and over time, with a linear trend creating nonstationarity. Specifically, the lnB_j(t) are independent normal with means 0.05j + 0.002(4 –j)t and variance 1.5. For each species, δ = 0.25. (For the data, see S2 Data).