Individual environmental niches in mobile organisms.

ABSTRACT: Individual variation is increasingly recognized as a central component of ecological processes, but its role in structuring environmental niche associations remains largely unknown. Species' responses to environmental conditions are ultimately determined by the niches of single individuals, yet environmental associations are typically captured only at the level of species. Here, we develop scenarios for how individual variation may combine to define the compound environmental niche of populations, use extensive movement data to document individual environmental niche variation, test associated hypotheses of niche configuration, and examine the consistency of individual niches over time. For 45 individual white storks (Ciconia ciconia; 116 individual-year combinations), we uncover high vari

SUBMITTER: Carlson BS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8316569 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature