There is extensive evidence that some species of ecological generalists, which use a wide diversity of resources, are in fact heterogeneous collections of relatively specialized individuals. This within-population variation, or "individual specialization," is a key requirement for frequency-dependent interactions that may drive a variety of types of evolutionary diversification and may influenc...

The tenet that ecological opportunity drives adaptive diversification has been central to theories of speciation since Darwin, yet no widely accepted definition or mechanistic framework for the concept currently exists. We propose a definition for ecological opportunity that provides an explicit mechanism for its action. In our formulation, ecological opportunity refers to environmental conditi...

Abstract We here develop a concept of an individualized niche in analogy to Hutchison’s population-level the ecological niche. consider (ecological) as range environmental conditions under which particular individual has expected lifetime reproductive success ≥ 1. Our primarily function, it refers match phenotype its contemporary environment (niche fit) while we discuss evolutionary fitness eva...

Organisms can receive not only a genetic inheritance from their ancestors but also an ecological inheritance, involving modifications their ancestors made to the environment through niche construction. Ecological inheritances may persist as a legacy, potentially generating selection pressures that favor sociality. Yet, most proposed cases of sociality being impacted by an ecological inheritance...

Boivin et al.’s (1) article profoundly deepens scientific understanding of anthropogenic global ecological change from Pleistocene to present by offering robust new evidence of early human transformation of the biosphere that should influence discussions on Anthropocene formalization (2, 3). As ecologists and evolutionary theorists, we applaud this work. However, we are also concerned that this...

Organisms regularly modify local resource distributions, influencing both their ecosystems and the evolution of traits whose fitness depends on such alterable sources of natural selection in environments. We call these processes niche construction. We explore the evolutionary consequences of niche construction using a two-locus population genetic model, which extends earlier analyses by allowin...

The purpose of ecological niche modelling is to obtain a probabilistic species distribution based on species localization and environmental data. The problem is highly complex from the architectural viewpoint because its requirements include different distributed, interoperable and integration issues. Monolithic solutions were proposed and implemented but they were not able to achieve all requi...

Habitat suitability models can be generated using methods requiring information on species presence or species presence and absence. Knowledge of the predictive performance of such methods becomes a critical issue to establish their optimal scope of application for mapping current species distributions under different constraints. Here, we use breeding bird atlas data in Catalonia as a working ...