Niche Breadth: Causes and Consequences for Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation

Abstract

Niche breadth is a unifying concept spanning diverse aspects of ecology, evolution, and conservation biology. Niche breadth usually refers to the diversity of resources used or environments tolerated by an individual, population, species, or clade. Here we review key research in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology in light of niche breadth. Namely, we explore the role of niche breadth in shaping geographic distributions and species richness from local to landscape scales, how niche breadth evolves and influences lineage diversification, and its use for understanding species invasions, responses to climate change, vulnerability to extinction, and ecosystem functioning. This diverse literature informs a research agenda that identifies focused needs for further progress: testing the hierarchical nature of niche breadth (e.g., of individuals, populations, and species); quantifying correlations in niche breadth among different niche axes and the role of environmental drivers and organismal constraints in generating these correlations; and evaluating the factors that decouple fundamental and realized niches. We describe how this research agenda could help unify disparate subdisciplines and shed light on key questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation.

The evolution of climatic niche breadth in terrestrial vertebrates

“…Evidence from these studies seems to suggest that lower-and upper-climatic niche limits might be uncoupled over evolutionary time, such that patterns of climatic niche breadth might be driven more by changes in one of the climatic niche boundaries, particularly in the case of temperature. However, despite this indirect evidence, few studies have directly assessed variation in evolutionary rates between different climatic range limits (Carscadden et al, 2020). In the largest study to date on this issue, Liu et al (2020) estimated rates of evolution of upper and lower niche limits for 2087 species of plants and vertebrates and detected substantial differences between these limits.…”

Distribution and protection of avian specialization in Europe

“…Previous work has focused on drivers shaping the spatial distribution of dietary and habitat specialization at a large spatial scale (Belmaker et al, 2012;Mimet et al, 2019;Rivas-Salvador et al, 2019). However, a deeper understanding of additional life-history characteristics constricting the survival of specialist species is essential (Carscadden et al, 2020) S8). Akaike's information criterion values for each model performed in this study are shown in the Supporting Information (Table S9).…”

How animals endure by bending environmental space: Redefining the fundamental niche

“…Niche theory is as old as ecology 1 and the concept of the fundamental niche 2 holds prominence, well beyond the environmental sciences, in areas as diverse as evolutionary theory 3 and cell biology 4 . The fundamental niche describes all environmental circumstances that allow a species to grow in numbers 2,5,6 and is assumed fixed, for as long as the genotypic composition of the species stays the same 7 .…”