Ecological Niche
Moderators: honeev, Leonid, amiradm, BioTeam
-
BiologicalParadox
- Garter
- Posts: 3
- Joined: Sat Jul 30, 2011 1:17 pm
Ecological Niche
Could someone please explain to me what this is, I have found multiple definitions, some conflicting. I would also love to know how to use it in a sentence.
Thanks in advance.
Thanks in advance.
Re: Ecological Niche
Niche is where species or population is in its ecosystem. In lesser term, how they make a living. There are diffrent dimensions of a niche that has a wide variety of aspects of the environment which must be considered.
• 3 sets of parameters:
I.Range of physical factors for survival and reproduction: temperature, humidity, pH, soil, sunlight, etc.
II. Biological factors: predators, prey, parasites, competitors, etc.
III. Behavior: seasonality, diurnal patterns, movement, social organization, etc.
Example: Bristlecone pines - They are only adaptive alone the treeline of snow-cap mountains. Another is the Devils Pud fish in Nevada. Thermophiles too are great example of niche.
Hope this helps.
• 3 sets of parameters:
I.Range of physical factors for survival and reproduction: temperature, humidity, pH, soil, sunlight, etc.
II. Biological factors: predators, prey, parasites, competitors, etc.
III. Behavior: seasonality, diurnal patterns, movement, social organization, etc.
Example: Bristlecone pines - They are only adaptive alone the treeline of snow-cap mountains. Another is the Devils Pud fish in Nevada. Thermophiles too are great example of niche.
Hope this helps.
An ecological niche is the role an organism plays in a community in terms of the habitat it occupies, e.g., both a wolf and the wolf spider are predators. So they occupy the same ecological niche, albeit in a different habitat (even though they can live together in the same area, the habitat of the spider is of course much smaller than that of the wolf). While the lynx and the wolf could occupy the same ecological niche, which means they then would have to compete for the same resources (prey). So there can be ecological niches such as: predator, herbivore, detrivore, etc.
Re: Ecological Niche
Niche is usually defined as a way organism lives its life.
Re: Ecological Niche
The definition I like is from http://www.nps.gov/glba/forteachers/marine-environment-instructional-resources.htm
while searching for the source of this definition, I came across this http://www.montana.edu/screel/Webpages/Bio%20303/Biol%20303%20niches.pdf
From Mitchell, Paul; Ecology, 101 Key Ideas; NTC Publishing Group; Chicago, IL; 2000; p069
; however, for completeness I would also include procreate.Ecological Niche - The way a species 'makes its living;' where it lives, what it consumes, and how it avoids consumption by predators or displacement by other species.
while searching for the source of this definition, I came across this http://www.montana.edu/screel/Webpages/Bio%20303/Biol%20303%20niches.pdf
From Mitchell, Paul; Ecology, 101 Key Ideas; NTC Publishing Group; Chicago, IL; 2000; p069
“There is no such thing as the ecological niche, there are at least three current, and quite different, uses of this abstract and enigmatic concept.
ecowiki lists 4:
Grinnellian niche: The Ecologist J. Grinnell was the first to use the term niche to describe the relationship between a species and its environment. His conceptualization pictured the niche as being the sum of the habitat requirements of a species. Niches in his view could be differentially occupied and vacated by species (Grinnell, 1917).
Eltonian niche: C. Elton is most famous for his work on understanding the flow of energy throughout ecosystems via food-webs. He devised a niche concept that was based on the role of a species in its environment in terms of its position within a food-web (Elton, 1927).
Hutchinsonian niche: G. E. Hutchinson, perhaps the most famous Ecologist who ever lived, developed a fully quantitative and revolutionary conception of the niche, based partly on the work of G. F. Gause who developed the competitive exclusion principle. He suggested that the niche could be represented mathematically as an n-dimensional hyper-volume whose dimensions corresponded to resource/environmental gradients over which the species in question was distributed in some uni-modal fashion. The niche according to Hutchinson could be divided into two facets; the realized niche which is the sum of a species niche dimensions that are unique to that particular species (if any) and the fundamental niche, which is the totality of a species niche dimensions, both shared with other species and unshared. The Hutchinsonian niche is defined by the species that it contains, in the absence of a species the niche can not exist in any Hutchinsonian sense, also competition can be measured by the magnitude of species nice overlap. (Hutchinson, 1944).
Chase and Leibold's ecological niche: J. Chase and M. Leibold have attempted to re-evaluate the usefulness of the niche concept after it fell into scientific 'disrepute' in the 1960s due to hypothetico-deductive criticisms concerning the lack of adequate null hypotheses when it was applied for the purpose of making long term and long range biodiversity predictions. Their fundamental premise is to address the niche in terms of criticisms levelled against it by biogeographers and neutralists, especially advocates of S. Hubbell's particular variety of neutralism. They 're-work' the niche concept to take into account the per-capita effects of a species on its environment and the idea that a minimum number of resources are required to sustain a species fittness (Chase and Leibold, 2003).
I like the "makes a living" definition, and the Hutchinsonian, "N-dimensional hyper-volume measured across N-resource states."
Grinnellian niche: The Ecologist J. Grinnell was the first to use the term niche to describe the relationship between a species and its environment. His conceptualization pictured the niche as being the sum of the habitat requirements of a species. Niches in his view could be differentially occupied and vacated by species (Grinnell, 1917).
Eltonian niche: C. Elton is most famous for his work on understanding the flow of energy throughout ecosystems via food-webs. He devised a niche concept that was based on the role of a species in its environment in terms of its position within a food-web (Elton, 1927).
Hutchinsonian niche: G. E. Hutchinson, perhaps the most famous Ecologist who ever lived, developed a fully quantitative and revolutionary conception of the niche, based partly on the work of G. F. Gause who developed the competitive exclusion principle. He suggested that the niche could be represented mathematically as an n-dimensional hyper-volume whose dimensions corresponded to resource/environmental gradients over which the species in question was distributed in some uni-modal fashion. The niche according to Hutchinson could be divided into two facets; the realized niche which is the sum of a species niche dimensions that are unique to that particular species (if any) and the fundamental niche, which is the totality of a species niche dimensions, both shared with other species and unshared. The Hutchinsonian niche is defined by the species that it contains, in the absence of a species the niche can not exist in any Hutchinsonian sense, also competition can be measured by the magnitude of species nice overlap. (Hutchinson, 1944).
Chase and Leibold's ecological niche: J. Chase and M. Leibold have attempted to re-evaluate the usefulness of the niche concept after it fell into scientific 'disrepute' in the 1960s due to hypothetico-deductive criticisms concerning the lack of adequate null hypotheses when it was applied for the purpose of making long term and long range biodiversity predictions. Their fundamental premise is to address the niche in terms of criticisms levelled against it by biogeographers and neutralists, especially advocates of S. Hubbell's particular variety of neutralism. They 're-work' the niche concept to take into account the per-capita effects of a species on its environment and the idea that a minimum number of resources are required to sustain a species fittness (Chase and Leibold, 2003).
I like the "makes a living" definition, and the Hutchinsonian, "N-dimensional hyper-volume measured across N-resource states."
-
leesajohnson
- Garter
- Posts: 45
- Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2016 5:00 am
- Location: London
An ecological niche is the role & position a species has in its environment - how it meets its needs for food and shelter, how it survives, & how it reproduces. A species 'niche includes all of its interactions with the biotic & abiotic factors of its environment. The ecological niche describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources & competitors (for example, by growing when resources are abundant, when predators, parasites & pathogens are scarce) & how it, in turn, alters those same factors (for example, limiting access to resources by other organisms, acting as a food source for predators and a consumer of prey).
- Attachments
-
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests