It remains a challenge to identify the geographical patterns and underlying environmental associations of species with unique ecological niches and distinct behaviors. This in turn hinders our understanding of the ecology as well as effective conservation management of threatened species. The white-eared night heron (Gorsachius magnificus) is a non-migratory nocturnal bird species that has a pa...

We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing ecological models with a multidimensional niche space. Our approach relies on the fact that ecological niches are described by sequences of symbols, which allows us to include multiple phenotypic traits. Ecological drivers, such as competitive exclusion, are modeled by introducing the Hamming distance between two sequences. We show that a suitabl...

The distribution and survival of trees during the last glacial maximum (LGM) has been of interest to paleoecologists, biogeographers, and geneticists. Ecological niche models that associate species occurrence and abundance with climatic variables are widely used to gain ecological and evolutionary insights and to predict species distributions over space and time. The present study deals with th...

BACKGROUND Species Distribution Models (SDMs) aim on the characterization of a species' ecological niche and project it into geographic space. The result is a map of the species' potential distribution, which is, for instance, helpful to predict the capability of alien invasive species. With regard to alien invasive species, recently several authors observed a mismatch between potential distrib...

The role of ecological niche in lineage diversification has been the subject of long-standing interest of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Gynandropaa frogs diversified into three independent clades endemic to the southeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Here, we address the question whether these clades kept the same niche after separation, and what it tells us about possible diversificati...

Changes to the Earth's climate may affect the distribution of countless species. Understanding the potential distribution of known invasive species under an altered climate is vital to predicting impacts and developing management policy. The present study employs ecological niche modeling to construct the global potential distribution range of the yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes) using...