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141 results for “niche partitioning”
Life history strategies complement niche partitioning to support the coexistence of closely related Gilliamella species in the bee gut
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Widespread temporal niche partitioning in an adaptive radiation of cichlid fishes
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Can diet niche partitioning enhance sexual dimorphism?
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Data from: Pop‐off data storage tags reveal niche partitioning between native and non‐native predators in a novel ecosystem
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Niche partitioning between planktivorous fish in the pelagic Baltic Sea assessed by DNA metabarcoding, qPCR and microscopy: Data and Analyses
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Niche partitioning among three snail-eating snakes revealed by dentition asymmetry and prey specialisation
<p>1. The level of dentition asymmetry in snail-eating snakes may reflect their prey choice and feeding efficiency on asymmetric land snails. The three species of Pareas snakes (Squamata: Pareidae) in Taiwan, which are partially sympatric distribution on the island, provide a potential case to test the hypothesis of niche partitioning and character displacement with regard to dentition asymmetry and specialisation in feeding behaviour.</p> <p>2. In this study, behavioural experiments confirmed that P. formosensis feeds exclusively on slugs, whereas P. atayal and P. komaii consumed both. However, P. atayal more efficiently preys on land snails than P. komaii, exhibiting a shorter handling time and fewer mandibular retractions.</p> <p>3. Micro-CT and ancestral character reconstruction demonstrated the lowest asymmetry in P. formosensis (the slug specialist), the highest dentition asymmetry in P. atayal (the land snail specialist), and flexibility in P. komaii (the niche switcher): increased dentition asymmetry when sympatrically distributed with the slug eater (character displacement), and decreased asymmetry when living alone (ecological niche release).</p> <p>4. Ecological niche modelling showed that the distribution P. formosensis is associated with the presence of slugs, while that of P. atayal could be explained by the land snails.<br> Combining the results from morphology, phylogeny, behavioural experiments and ecological niche modelling, we showed that competition in the sympatric region might have facilitated character displacement among congeners, while absence of competition in allopatric region has led to ecological niche release.</p>
Data for: Seasonally mediated niche partitioning in a vertically compressed pelagic predator guild
<p>Niche partitioning among closely related, sympatric species is a fundamental concept in ecology, and its mechanisms are of broad interest for understanding ecosystem functioning and predicting the impacts of human-driven environmental change. However, identifying mechanisms by which top marine predators partition available resources has been especially challenging given the difficulty of quantifying resource use of large pelagic animals. In the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP), three large, highly mobile and ecologically similar pelagic predators (blue marlin (<em>Makaira</em> <em>nigricans</em>), black marlin (<em>Istiompax</em> <em>indica</em>) and sailfish (<em>Istiophorus platypterus))</em> coexist in a vertically compressed habitat. To evaluate each species' ecological niche, we leveraged a decade of recreational fisheries data, multi-year satellite tracking with high-resolution dive data, and stable isotope analysis. Fishery interaction and telemetry-based three-dimensional seasonal utilization distributions suggested high spatial and temporal overlap among species; however, seasonal and diel variability in diving behaviour produced spatial partitioning, leading to low trophic overlap among species. Expanding oxygen minimum zones will reduce the available vertical habitat within predator guilds, likely leading to increases in interspecific competition. Thus, understanding the mechanisms of habitat partitioning among predators in the vertically compressed ETP can provide insight into how predators in other ocean regions may respond to vertically limited habitats.</p>
Data from: Nitrogen niche partitioning between tropical legumes and grasses conditionally weakens under elevated CO2
<p>Plant community biodiversity can be maintained, at least partially, by shifts in species interactions between facilitation and competition for resources as environmental conditions change. These interactions also drive ecosystem functioning, including productivity, and can promote over-yielding- an ecosystem service prioritized in agro-ecosystems, such as pastures, that occurs when multiple species together are more productive than the component species alone. Importantly, species interactions that can result in over-yielding may shift in response to rising CO<sub>2</sub> concentrations and changes in resource availability, and the consequences these shifts have on production is uncertain especially in the context of tropical mixed-species grasslands.</p> <p>We examined the relative performance of two species pairs of tropical pasture grasses and legumes growing in monoculture and mixtures in a glasshouse experiment manipulating CO<sub>2</sub>. We investigated how over-yielding can arise from nitrogen (N) niche partitioning and biotic facilitation using stable isotopes to differentiate soil N from biological N fixation (BNF) within N acquisition into aboveground biomass for these two-species mixtures.</p> <p>We found that N niche partitioning in species-level use of soil N vs. BNF drove species interactions in mixtures. Importantly partitioning and overyielding were generally reduced under elevated CO<sub>2</sub>. However, this finding was mixture-dependent based on biomass of dominant species in mixtures and the strength of selection effects for the dominant species.</p> <p>This study demonstrates that rising atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> may alter niche partitioning between co-occurring species, with negative implications for the over-yielding benefits predicted for legume-grass mixtures in working landscapes with tropical species. Furthermore, these changes in inter-species interactions may have consequences for grassland composition that are not yet considered in larger-scale projections for impacts of climate change and species distributions. </p>
Data for: Carnivore niche partitioning in a human landscape
<p>To minimize competitive overlap, carnivores modify one of their critical niche axes: space, time, or resources. However, we currently lack rules for how carnivore communities operate in human-dominated landscapes. We simultaneously quantified overlap in the critical niche axes of a simple carnivore community – an apex carnivore (<i>Puma concolor</i>), a dominant meso-carnivore (<i>Lycalopex culpaeus</i>), and a subordinate meso-carnivore (<i>L. griseus</i>) – in a human-landscape featuring pastoralists and semi-domestic carnivores (i.e., dogs <i>Canis familiaris</i>). We found that dominant species had strong negative effects on the space-use of subordinate ones, which ultimately created space for subordinate small-carnivores. Humans and dogs were strictly diurnal, whereas the native carnivore community was nocturnal and exhibited high temporal overlap. Dietary overlap was high among the native carnivores, but dogs were trophically decoupled, largely because of human food subsidies. Our results show that in landscapes with evident human presence, temporal and dietary partitioning among native carnivores can be limited, leaving space as the most important axis to be partitioned among carnivores. We believe that these findings – the first to simultaneously assess all three critical niche axes among competing carnivores and humans and their associated species (i.e., domesticated carnivores) – are transferable to other carnivore communities in human modified landscapes.</p>
Differential nutrient limitation and tree height control leaf physiology, supporting niche partitioning in tropical dipterocarp forests
<p><span>Revealing the mechanisms of environmental niche partitioning within lowland tropical forests is important for understanding the drivers of current species distributions and potential vulnerability to environmental change. Tropical forest structure and species composition change across edaphic gradients in Borneo over short distances. However, our understanding of how edaphic conditions affect tree physiology and whether these relationships drive niche partitioning within Bornean forests remains incomplete. </span></p> <p><span>This study evaluated how leaf physiological function changes with nutrient availability across a fine-scale edaphic gradient and whether these relationships vary according to tree height. Furthermore, we tested whether intraspecific leaf trait variation allows generalist species to populate a wider range of environments.</span></p> <p><span>We measured leaf traits of 218 trees ranging in height from 4 to 66 m from 13 dipterocarp species within four tropical forest types (alluvial, mudstone, sandstone, kerangas) occurring along an < 5km edaphic gradient in North Borneo. The traits measured included saturating photosynthesis (<em>A</em><sub>sat</sub>), maximum photosynthetic capacity (<em>V</em><sub>cmax</sub>), leaf dark respiration (<em>R</em><sub>leaf</sub>), leaf mass per area (LMA), leaf thickness, minimum stomatal conductance (<em>g</em><sub>dark</sub>) and leaf nutrient concentrations (N, P, Ca, K, Mg). </span></p> <p><span>Across all species, leaf traits varied consistently in response to soil nutrient availability across forest types except <em>R</em><sub>leaf_mass</sub>, [<em>Mg</em>]<sub>leaf</sub> and [<em>Ca</em>]<sub>leaf</sub>. Changes in photosynthesis and respiration rates were related to different leaf nutrients across forest types, with greater nutrient-use efficiency in more nutrient-poor environments. Generalist species partially or fully compensated reductions in mass-based photosynthesis through increasing LMA in more nutrient-poor environments. </span></p> <p><span>Leaf traits also varied with tree height, except <em>V</em><sub>cmax_mass</sub>, but only in response to height-related modifications of leaf morphology (LMA and leaf thickness). These height-trait relationships did not vary across the edaphic gradient, except for <em>A</em><sub>sat</sub>, [<em>N</em>]leaf, [<em>P</em>]<sub>leaf</sub> and [<em>K</em>]<sub>leaf</sub>. </span></p> <p><span>Our results highlight that modification of leaf physiological function and morphology act as important adaptations for Bornean dipterocarps in response to edaphic and vertical environmental gradients. Meanwhile, multiple nutrients appear to contribute to niche partitioning and could drive species distributions and high biodiversity within Bornean forest landscapes.</span></p>
Data for the article entitled: Linking sexual size dimorphism to trophic niche partitioning in a generalist predator
<p>Sexual size dimorphism is a common phenomenon in mammals, and researchers have been trying to demonstrate the evolutionary causes leading to sexual dimorphism. Two main hypotheses emerged: (i) the sexual selection hypothesis and (ii) the sexual competition hypothesis (also called resource partitioning hypothesis). Here, we attempted to link sexual dimorphism in fishers (Pekania pennanti (Erxleben, 1777)) with their fall diet using stable isotope profiling and body and skull measurements. We used the carcasses of 39 fishers which were caught in eastern Québec during fall 2014 by volunteer trappers as well as several potential prey items ranging from small rodents to cervids. We expected minimal niche overlap between sexes, as males should be able to exploit different prey species than females. We also expected to observe an effect of age class (adults vs. juveniles) on trophic niche. As expected, we found great evidence of sexual dimorphism in both body mass and skull measurements: males were heavier and longer than females and had a larger zygomatic and intracanine width and a longer skull. While proportions of prey in diet according to sex and age did not vary greatly, we found some evidence of niche partitioning using Layman's metrics. Indeed, females tended to have a less diversified and more similar diet compared to one another, whereas males showed more diversified and contrasted diets. Despite our limited sample size, our findings provide partial support to the sexual competition hypothesis, as the difference in body and skull size based on sex could have evolved to lessen intraspecific competition in fishers.</p>
Niche partitioning overrides interspecific competition to determine plant species distributions along a nutrient gradient
<p>Changes in some combination of niche availability, niche overlap and the strength of interspecific interactions are thought to drive changes in plant composition along resource gradients. However, because these processes are difficult to measure in the field, their relative importance in driving compositional change in plant communities remains unclear. In an Australian temperate grassland, we added seeds of three native and three exotic grasses to 1,875 experimental plots in a way that allowed us to simultaneously estimate niche availability, niche overlap and the strength of pairwise interspecific interactions along a gradient of nutrient availability, obtained by adding 0, 5 or 20 g/m<sup>2</sup> each of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium jointly to plots. Niche availability (the proportion of microsites suitable for establishment and growth) was generally low and did not vary in response to nutrient addition. Most species co-occurred along the nutrient gradient by partitioning the available niche space. Where species interacted due to niche overlap, the abundance of one species, the native <em>Chloris</em> <em>truncata</em>, was usually facilitated by other species, with each of the five other species increasing the niche availability to <em>C</em>. <em>truncata</em> under at least one nutrient treatment. <em>Chloris</em> <em>truncata</em> also competitively excluded two species from some but not all sites they could otherwise have occupied. These outcomes did not clearly differ across nutrient treatments. Our results show that fine-scale spatial heterogeneity in establishment microsites can enable species to co-occur via niche partitioning, and competitive exclusion is rare. This finding contributes to an emerging picture that niche partitioning is common and frequently a stronger influence on recruitment outcomes than interspecific competition. The importance of competition in structuring plant communities may be overestimated if recruitment processes are overlooked.</p>
Picophytoplankton lineages display clear niche partitioning but overall positive response to future ocean warming
<p>This repository contains data used in the Flombaum et al. (2019) Nature Geoscience paper entitled "<strong>Picophytoplankton lineages display clear niche partitioning but overall positive response to future ocean warming" </strong>for sensitivity tests.</p> <p>npp_91x180.mat is a 2D net primary production data from satellite ( SeaWiFS).</p> <p><a href="https://zenodo.org/api/files/ea47715e-18fe-42d4-8d36-848824829b53/omega2_ad1e-05_ai1000.mat">omega2_ad1e-05_ai1000.mat</a> contains advection and diffusion transport operator.</p> <p><a href="https://zenodo.org/api/files/ea47715e-18fe-42d4-8d36-848824829b53/po4obs_91x180x24.mat">po4obs_91x180x24.mat</a> is 3D dissolved inorganic phosphorus concentrations obtained from WOA2013 and interpolated into the inverse model gird (91x180x24);</p> <p><a href="https://zenodo.org/api/files/ea47715e-18fe-42d4-8d36-848824829b53/xhat_91x180_control.mat">xhat_91x180_control.mat</a> is optimal phosphorus model parameters; It has four parameters: <em>b - </em><em>Marine curve exponent; kappa_d - dissolved organic phosphorus remineralization rate constant; alpha and beta: parameters used to scale satellite NPP to model organic phosphorus production.</em></p>
Isotopes complement morphology: Niche partitioning among greenbuls in the Afrotropical lowland forest
<p><a name="_Hlk153960869"></a>Biodiversity plays a vital role in ecosystem functioning, so understanding how species coexist is a cornerstone of ecology. However, despite decades of research, our current knowledge is incomplete due to methodological limitations and sampling bias, particularly in the species-rich tropics. In this study, we combined bill and body morphological traits with stable isotopes in feathers to quantify niche differentiation among six co-occurring greenbul taxa, a diverse group of frugivorous and insectivorous passerines with remarkable similarities in body shape, in the lowland rainforests of Mt. Cameroon, West Central Africa. Our results showed that the greenbul’s niche space was primarily differentiated by variations in body morphology, with Yellow-lored Bristlebill <em>Bleda notatus</em> and Eastern Bearded Greenbul <em>Criniger chloronotus</em> occupying ecological niches distinct from the remaining four taxa, while bill morphology indicated substantial overlap between the taxa. In addition, isotopic composition of the feathers revealed a separation of Western Greenbul <em>Arizelocichla tephrolaema</em> from the other taxa. Our results show that the integration of morphological and isotopic data can provide robust estimates of niche overlaps, providing evidence for the differentiation of ecological roles. This highlights the importance of integrating variable traits to improve our understanding of how animals exploit the multidimensional niche space that enables their coexistence.</p>
Fine-scale intraspecific niche partitioning in a highly mobile, marine megafauna species: implications for ecology and conservation
<p>A species may partition its realized ecological niche along bionomic and/or scenopoetic axes due to intraspecific competition for limited resources. How partitioning manifests depends on resource needs and availability by and for the partitioning groups. Here we demonstrate the utility of analyzing short- and long-term stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios from imperiled marine megafauna to elucidate realized niche partitioning in these species. We captured 113 loggerhead (<em>Caretta</em> <em>caretta</em>) sea turtles at a high-use area near Crystal River, Florida, between 2016–2022, comprising 53 subadults, 10 adult males, and 50 adult females. Isotopic analyses indicated that loggerheads partition their realized ecological niche by life stage, along a scenopoetic axis. Most adults likely forage and reside in shallow areas of the study site, with most subadults displaying habitat switching between deeper locations to forage and shallower locations to rest. Some subadults, like adults, also forage and reside in shallow areas, and may display behaviors to avoid intraspecific competition. Analysis of stable isotopes with different turnover rates was critical for this characterization of intraspecific niche partitioning in loggerhead turtles, which has direct implications for ongoing research and conservation efforts for this and other imperiled species.</p>
Belowground niche partitioning is maintained under extreme drought
<p>Belowground niche partitioning presents a key mechanism maintaining species coexistence and diversity. Its importance is currently reinforced under climate-change-altering soil hydrological conditions. However, experimental tests examining the magnitude of its change under climate change are scarce. We combined measurements of oxygen stable isotopes to infer plant water-uptake depths and extreme drought manipulation in grasslands. Belowground niche partitioning was evidenced by different water-uptake depths of co-occurring species under ambient and extreme drought conditions despite an increased overlap among species due to a shift to shallower soil layers under drought. A co-occurrence of contrasting strategies related to change of species water-uptake depths' distribution was likely key for species to maintain some extent of belowground niche partitioning and could contribute to stabilizing coexistence under drought. Our results suggest that belowground niche partitioning could mitigate negative effects on diversity imposed by extreme drought under future climate.</p>
Minnesota peat viromes reveal terrestrial and aquatic niche partitioning for local and global viral populations
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Data for: Carnivore niche partitioning in a human landscape
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Data from: Isotopic niche variation from the Holocene to today reveals minimal partitioning and individualistic dynamics among four sympatric desert mice
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Fine-scale intraspecific niche partitioning in a highly mobile, marine megafauna species: implications for ecology and conservation
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