We modeled the ecological niche of a globally successful Bacillus anthracis sublineage in the United States, Italy and Kazakhstan to better understand the geographic distribution of anthrax and potential associations between regional populations and ecology. Country-specific ecological-niche models were developed and reciprocally transferred to the other countries to determine if pathogen prese...

A formal theory of the ecological niche is indispensable not only for semantic precision in philosophy to understand and compare it with other meanings of niche, but also when computer scientists and ecologists desire to create interoperable software where one can retrieve the niche of a species and compare their parameters. The proposed model is a more fine-grained description of the ecologica...

Introduction Conclusions References Tables Figures ◭ ◮ ◭ ◮ Back Close Full Screen / Esc Abstract Introduction Conclusions References Tables Figures ◭ ◮ ◭ ◮ Back Close Full Screen / Esc Abstract In the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, sperm whales, pilot whales and Risso's dolphins prey on cephalopods exclusively or preferentially. In order to evaluate their competition , we modelled their habita...

AIM The origins of ecological diversity in continental species assemblages have long intrigued biogeographers. We apply phylogenetic comparative analyses to disentangle the evolutionary patterns of ecological niches in an assemblage of European birds. We compare phylogenetic patterns in trophic, habitat and climatic niche components. LOCATION Europe. METHODS From polygon range maps and hand...

The neutral theory for community structure and biodiversity is dependent on the assumption that species are equivalent to each other in all important ecological respects. We explore what this concept of equivalence means in ecological communities, how such species may arise evolutionarily, and how the possibility of ecological equivalents relates to previous ideas about niche differentiation. W...

A cornerstone of ecological theory is the ecological niche. Yet little is known about how individuals come to adopt it: whether it is innate or learned. Here, we report a cross-fostering experiment in the wild where we transferred eggs of blue tits, Cyanistes caeruleus, to nests of great tits, Parus major, and vice versa, to quantify the consequences of being reared in a different social contex...

Criticism has been levelled at climate-change-induced forecasts of species range shifts that do not account explicitly for complex population dynamics. The relative importance of such dynamics under climate change is, however, undetermined because direct tests comparing the performance of demographic models vs. simpler ecological niche models are still lacking owing to difficulties in evaluatin...

The theoretical description of the forces that shape ecological communities focuses around two classes of models. In niche theory, deterministic interactions between species, individuals, and the environment are considered the dominant factor, whereas in neutral theory, stochastic forces, such as demographic noise, speciation, and immigration, are dominant. Species abundance distributions predi...