For a species to maintain its population, its individuals must survive and reproduce. Certain combinations of environmental conditions are necessary for individuals of each species to tolerate the physical environment, obtain energy and nutrients, and avoid predators. The total requirements of a species for all resources and physical conditions determine where it can live and how abundant it can be at any one place within its range. These requirements are termed abstractly the ecological niche.
G.E. Hutchinson (1958) suggested that the niche could be modeled as an imaginary space with many dimensions, in which each dimension or axis represents the range of some environmental condition or resource that is required by the species. Thus, the niche of a plant might include the range of temperatures that it can tolerate, the intensity of light required for photosynthesis, specific humidity regimes, and minimum quantities of essential soil nutrients for uptake.
A useful extension of the niche concept is the distinction between fundamental and realized niches (Figure 9g-1). The fundamental niche of a species includes the total range of environmental conditions that are suitable for existence without the influence of interspecific competition or predation from other species. The realized niche describes that part of the fundamental niche actually occupied by the species.
| Figure 9g-1: The following diagram shows a hypothetical situation where a species distribution is controlled by just two environmental variables: temperature and moisture. The green and yellow areas describe the combinations of temperature and moisture that the species requires for survival and reproduction in its habitat. This resource space is known as the fundamental niche. The green area describes the actual combinations of these two variables that the species utilizes in its habitat. This subset of the fundamental niche is known as the realized niche. |