  Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and
their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying
birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that
accounts for many empirical datasets in genetics and ecology. However, the
restriction of the model to demographic [${\cal{O}} ({\sqrt N})$] noise yields
relatively slow dynamics that appears to be in conflict with both short-term
and long-term characteristics of the observed systems. Here we analyze two of
these problems - age size relationships and species extinction time - in the
framework of a neutral theory with both demographic and environmental
stochasticity. It turns out that environmentally induced variations of the
demographic rates control the long-term dynamics and modify dramatically the
predictions of the neutral theory with demographic noise only, yielding much
better agreement with empirical data. We consider two prototypes of "zero mean"
environmental noise, one which is balanced with regard to the arithmetic
abundance, another balanced in the logarithmic (fitness) space, study their
species lifetime statistics and discuss their relevance to realistic models of
community dynamics.
