numbers of persian leopards have considerably decreased in recent years and for this reason it has been categorized as endangered in the iucn classification. habitat destruction is believed to be the main cause of the species population decline. hence, attempts to preserve the remaining habitats of this kind of animal effectively are deemed essential in reversing its downgrading trend. to hit t...

1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, 37996 Knoxville, Tennessee 2 BIOSS, King’s Buildings, EH93JZ Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (email: [email protected]) 3 Center for Theoretical Study, Charles University, Jilská 1, 110 00-CZ Praha 1, Czech Republic (e-mail: [email protected]) 4 Department of Ecology. Faculty of Science, Charles University, Viničná 7, 128 44-CZ...

The ecological niche is a prominent theoretical concept in many ecological fields, central to ecological understanding of species interactions and community structure. To better understand this important concept, and the impact it has had on ecology, we used a citation analysis to examine the history of the niche through citation patterns during the 20th century. In particular, we sought to doc...

In the past decades, it has been debated whether ecological niche should be conserved among closely related species (phylogenetic niche conservatism, PNC) or largely divergent (traditional ecological niche theory and ecological speciation) and whether niche specialist and generalist might remain in equilibrium or niche generalist could not appear. In this study, we employed morphological traits...

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...

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...