Niche specification and competition modeling

✍ Scribed by James E. Wuenscher

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1969
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 424 KB
• Volume: 25
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5193
• DOI: 10.1016/s0022-5193(69)80031-7

✦ Synopsis

The concept of the ecological niche as an environmentally dimensioned hypervolume provides a theoretical method of niche description applicable to plants as well as animals. This paper proposes that the niche of a plant can be more fully specified by including plant responses to the environment as additional dimensions of the niche hypervolume. Any point within "a species' niche may be represented by the values of environmental variables and species responses at that point. The environment-response hypervolume is considered a many dimensional vector space. Any point of the niche is a vector and can be expressed as a one-dimensional matrix of discrete values of environmental factors (the habitat vector) and organism responses (the response vector). Since organism response at each point in the niche is specified, it is possible to model interspecies competition by comparing response vectors of competing species at points of niche overlap.