Determining the patterns, causes and consequences of character displacement is central to our understanding of competition in ecological communities. However, the majority of competition research has occurred over small spatial extents or focused on fine-scale differences in morphology or behaviour. The effects of competition on broad-scale distribution and niche characteristics of species remain poorly understood but critically important. Using rangewide species distribution models, we evaluated whether Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) or bobcat (Lynx rufus) were displaced in regions of sympatry. Consistent with our prediction, we found that lynx niches were less similar to those of bobcat in areas of sympatry versus allopatry, with a stronger reliance on snow cover driving lynx niche divergence in the sympatric zone. By contrast, bobcat increased niche breadth in zones of sympatry, and bobcat niches were equally similar to those of lynx in zones of sympatry and allopatry. These findings suggest that competitively disadvantaged species avoid competition at large scales by restricting their niche to highly suitable conditions, while superior competitors expand the diversity of environments used. Our results indicate that competition can manifest within climatic niche space across species' ranges, highlighting the importance of biotic interactions occurring at large spatial scales on niche dynamics.

The long-standing view in ecology is that disparity in overall resource selection is the basis for identifying niche breadth patterns, with species having narrow selection being classified “specialists” and those with broader selection being “generalists”. The standard model of niche breadth characterizes generalists and specialists as having comparable levels of overall total resource exploitation, with specialists exploiting resources at a higher level of performance over a narrower range of conditions. This view has gone largely unchallenged. An alternate model predicts total resource use being lower for the specialized species with both peaking at a comparable level of performance over a particular resource gradient. To reconcile the niche breadth paradigm we contrasted both models by developing range-wide species distribution models for Canada lynx, Lynx canadensis, and bobcat, Lynx rufus. Using a suite of environmental factors to define each species’ niche, we determined that Canada lynx demonstrated higher total performance over a restricted set of variables, specifically those related to snow and altitude, while bobcat had higher total performance across most variables. Unlike predictions generated by the standard model, bobcat level of exploitation was not compromised by the trade-off with peak performance, and Canada lynx were not restricted to exploiting a narrower range of conditions. Instead, the emergent pattern was that specialist species have a higher total resource utilization and peak performance value within a smaller number of resources or environmental axes than generalists. Our results also indicate that relative differences in niche breadth are strongly dependent on the variable under consideration, implying that the appropriate model describing niche breadth dynamics between specialists and generalists may be more complex than either the traditional heuristic or our modified version. Our results demonstrate a need to re-evaluate traditional, but largely untested, assumptions regarding resource utilization in species with broad and narrow niches.

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Understanding the effects of climate change on species' persistence is a major research interest; however, most studies have focused on responses at the northern or expanding range edge. There is a pressing need to explain how species can persist at their southern range when changing biotic interactions will influence species occurrence. For predators, variation in distribution of primary prey owing to climate change will lead to mismatched distribution and local extinction, unless their diet is altered to more extensively include alternate prey. We assessed whether addition of prey information in climate projections restricted projected habitat of a specialist predator, Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), and if switching from their primary prey (snowshoe hare; Lepus americanus) to an alternate prey (red squirrel; Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) mitigates range restriction along the southern range edge. Our models projected distributions of each species to 2050 and 2080 to then refine predictions for southern lynx on the basis of varying combinations of prey availability. We found that models that incorporated information on prey substantially reduced the total predicted southern range of lynx in both 2050 and 2080. However, models that emphasized red squirrel as the primary species had 7-24% lower southern range loss than the corresponding snowshoe hare model. These results illustrate that (i) persistence at the southern range may require species to exploit higher portions of alternate food; (ii) selection may act on marginal populations to accommodate phenotypic changes that will allow increased use of alternate resources; and (iii) climate projections based solely on abiotic data can underestimate the severity of future range restriction. In the case of Canada lynx, our results indicate that the southern range likely will be characterized by locally varying levels of mismatch with prey such that the extent of range recession or local adaptation may appear as a geographical mosaic.

In recent years, it has been argued that the effect of predator fear exacts a greater demographic toll on prey populations than the direct killing of prey. However, efforts to quantify the effects of fear have primarily relied on experiments that replace predators with predator cues. Interpretation of these experiments must consider two important caveats: (1) the magnitude of experimenter-induced predator cues may not be realistically comparable to those of the prey's natural sensory environment, and (2) given functional predators are removed from the treatments, the fear effect is measured in the absence of any consumptive effects, a situation which never occurs in nature. We contend that demographic consequences of fear in natural populations may have been overestimated because the intensity of predator cues applied by experimenters in the majority of studies has been unnaturally high, in some instances rarely occurring in nature without consumption. Furthermore, the removal of consumption from the treatments creates the potential situation that individual prey in poor condition (those most likely to contribute strongly to the observed fear effects via starvation or reduced reproductive output) may have been consumed by predators in nature prior to the expression of fear effects, thus confounding consumptive and fear effects. Here, we describe an alternative treatment design that does not utilize predator cues, and in so doing, better quantifies the demographic effect of fear on wild populations. This treatment substitutes the traditional cue experiment where consumptive effects are eliminated and fear is simulated with a design where fear is removed and consumptive effects are simulated through the experimental removal of prey. Comparison to a natural population would give a more robust estimate of the effect of fear in the presence of consumption on the demographic variable of interest. This approach represents a critical advance in quantifying the mechanistic pathways through which predation structures ecological communities. Discussing the merits of both treatments will motivate researchers to go beyond simply describing the existence of fear effects and focus on testing their true magnitude in wild populations and natural communities.