Latest Ecological niche Stories
CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa., Jan. 1, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- In today's economy, small business owners have displayed a true tenacity with keeping up with major corporations and maintaining market relevancy. While all local and small companies have their own challenges, many business owners attempting to serve a niche market worry about their opportunity for success. A recent article from The Ottawa Citizen attempts to provide advice on whether new businesses should serve a select...
New research suggests that the way dinosaurs reproduced could have led to their demise. According to research from the Zoological Society of London, dinosaurs became at risk when they began to lay eggs. Working together with colleagues, Daryl Codron and Marcus Clauss from the University of Zurich conducted this research into the possible beginning stages of the dinosaurs extinction. Their work has been published in the journal Biology Letters. The trouble could have been the sheer size of...
Separate species that live in radically different environments don't necessarily also have different ecological niches. This is the finding of a study investigating the accuracy of current statistical tests that use models of geographic distributions to infer changes in environmental requirements.In a new study published in the journal Systematic Biology, a model simulating the distributions of two imaginary species with identical environmental requirements, or ecological niches, was created....
Competition plays a decisive role in climate change adaptationSpecies distribution models are of only limited use in predicting the future distribution of mammals. This is the finding of a study of the climate niches of 140 indigenous European mammals. The researchers analyzed data on species distribution, climate, land cover and topography, as well as the phylogenetic information of the species. Judging by the large differences in climate niches even for closely related species, mammals seem...
Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have found strong evidence that niche differences are critical to biodiversity. Their findings are published online in this week's issue of the journal Nature."Ecologists have long assumed that species differences in how they use the environment are key to explaining the large number of species we see all around us, but the importance of such niches have never been field tested," said first author Jonathan M. Levine, associate professor in UCSB's...
Consider the case of the three-spine stickleback. These tiny fish that thrive in oceans and in fresh water might appear to be the same, yet ecologists are finding that they are actually a diverse collection of very specialized individuals.Understanding the ecological causes and consequences of such ecological variation is the goal of a group of scientists meeting at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, July...
