The fit between life histories and ecological niche is a paradigm of phenotypic evolution, also widely used to explain patterns of species co-occurrence. By analysing the lifestyles of a sympatric avian assemblage, we show that species' solutions to environmental problems are not unbound. We identify a life-history continuum structured on the cost of reproduction along a temperature gradient, a...

It is very complex to model, study and analyze the dynamical behaviors of the complex ecosystems. Many ecological theoretical problems are based on niche. The niche one species occupies and the relation between niches of different species will directly influence the species’ dynamical behaviors. The discussion of niche has been very important to an ecosystem. Fuzzy set theory gave a new creativ...

Ecological niche divergence and adaptation to new environments are thought to play important roles in driving speciation. Whether recently evolved species show evidence for niche divergence or conservation is vital towards understanding the role of ecology in the process of speciation. The genus Procapra is an ancient, monophyletic lineage endemic to Asia that contains three extant species (P. ...

White belts of snow clad mountains all over the world each winter. Even if there is no snow, the tourism industry is able to produce the white finery at the push of the button, thereby consuming large amounts of water. Studying Damüls, a well-known ski resort in Austria's westernmost province Vorarlberg, we can show that the development of a service sector within agro-pastoral landscapes was co...

Niche construction is a process whereby organisms that modify their own or the others’ niches through their ecological activities. It is getting much attention in evolutionary studies but still poorly understood. Our purpose is to clarify the effects of spatial locality of niche construction on the evolution of the niche-constructing trait. Especially, we focus on the evolution of negative nich...

BACKGROUND Predicting the ecological niche and potential habitat distribution of a given organism is one of the central domains of ecological and biogeographical research. A wide variety of modeling techniques have been developed for this purpose. In order to implement these models, the users must prepare a specific runtime environment for each model, learn how to use multiple model platforms, ...