Niche ANDREW

Theniche is an abstract concept that describes the ecological space that a species occupies. A species’ niche is determined by the environmental conditions it inhabits, the resources it uses, and its interactions with other species. The niche has been a fundamental concept in ecological theory for almost a century. It was first developed by American zoologist Joseph Grinnell and English zoologist Charles S. Elton (Griesemer 1992), although components of the niche concept appeared in the writings of Darwin, Wallace, and other early naturalists (Vandermeer 1972). Grinnell and Elton had distinct conceptions of the niche and applied the term differently, but by the middle of the twentieth century most ecological textbooks blended their views into a single, rather vague idea that the niche described an organism’s ecological role in the community. The niche concept was formalized in 1957 by the British-born ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson as a multidimensional space, an “n-dimensional hyper volume,” whose dimensions describe all of the biotic and abiotic factors influencing an organism (Hutchinson 1957). The dimensions describing an organism’s niche may include factors such as temperature, rainfall, altitude, seasonality, and food availability; although a volume of more than three dimensions is difficult to visualize, it provides a useful abstract description of the conditions necessary for a species to maintain a viable population. Hutchinson’s rigorous, formal definition revolutionized niche theory and is the basis of the modern niche concept. This concept has been further developed, mathematically specified, and empirically examined in the decades since by ecologists Colwell, Lawton, Levins, MacArthur, Roughgarden, Schoener, and others. Hutchinson’s geometric abstraction of the niche describes the full set of conditions in which a species can survive and persist, its “fundamental