isfahan wild sheep ovis orientalis isphahanica is listed as vulnerable in the iucn red list of threatened species. adequate knowledge on habitat requirements and environmental factors determining the niche of a species is central to its conservation programmes. however, there is scarcity of data on habitat associations of this species in iran. a gis-based model, using presence-only data, was us...

G. Evelyn Hutchinson more than a half century ago proposed that one could characterize the ecological niche of a species as an abstract mapping of population dynamics onto an environmental space, the axes of which are abiotic and biotic factors that influence birth and death rates. If a habitat has conditions within a species' niche, a population should persist without immigration from external...

Conserving biodiversity in the face of climate change requires a predictive ecology of species distributions. Nowhere is this need more acute than in the tropics, which harbor the majority of Earth’s species and face rapid and large climate and land-use changes. However, the study of species distributions and their responses to climate change in high diversity tropical regions is potentially cr...

necessitates knowledge of species requirements for dispersal. Yet, current connectivity modelling and management often implicitly assume that dispersal requirements of species are approximated by characteristics of their occupied habitat (Zeller et al. 2012). Th is set of environments constitutes the species occupied niche (sensu Peterson et al. 2011; Table 1). Th is assumption (i.e. that speci...

A review article on life strategies and ecomorphological adaptations (xerothalloid and xeropottioid life syndromes) of bryophytes is given, based on the hitherto known and analysed terrestrial, saxicolous and epiphytic communities of the Near and Middle East. The examples given impressively demonstrate common adaptive trends that arise convergently but independently in unrelated taxa when they ...

Predicting species' responses to the combined effects of habitat and climate changes has become a major challenge in ecology and conservation biology. However, the effects of climatic and habitat gradients on species distributions have generally been considered separately. Here, we explore the relationships between the habitat and thermal dimensions of the ecological niche in European common bi...

Aim Ecological niche modelling is one of the main tools that allows for the incorporation of climate change effects into conservation planning. For example, ecological niche model predictions can be used to rank species by degree of predicted future habitat loss. While many studies have considered how different modelling decisions contribute to uncertainty in niche model outputs, here we evalua...

Organisms that have ecologically similar sexual and asexual forms present an evolutionary puzzle, as theory predicts that eventually one form should eliminate the other. However, both forms may persist if there is niche partitioning between them. Geographical parthenogenesis is a hypothesis that predicts that in terms of niche use the asexual form in such pairs should be more ecologically succe...