Understanding the Concept of Ecological Niche

INTRODUCTION
The concept of ecological niche can be considered as one of the most important theoretical background in ecology. This was developed over several decades by various researchers in the world. The development process of the niche concept primarily tried to answer basic observational questions such as why does an organism perform as it does? why does it live where it lives? why does it eat what it eats? how do organisms interact with one another? which organisms can coexist with one another? why are some species abundant and others rare? why are some species widespread and others localized? what determines how many kinds of organisms will coexist through space and time? how do ecological interactions influence a species’ evolutionary routes? what consequences does the presence of a species have on ecosystem-level process and function?(Chase & Leibold, 2003), are several questions out of many others. Although, answers to above questions clarified through various researches have been done all around the world, the niche concept remains one of the most puzzling, and yet important subject in ecology.

The understanding of the niche concept is an important component in any ecological studies, ranging from the study of individual species behavior, morphology and physiology to community level species participation in ecosystem structuring and functioning. The history of the use of initial niche concept can be traced down from Darwin’s (1859) and Wallace’s (1876) pioneer writings on natural selection and evolution where they implicitly refer to species roles in the environment as sited by Chase and Leibold (2003). Furthermore, it is possible to identify several naturalists who discussed concepts related to a species niche, but C...

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...36) which is in some instances referred by “Volterra-Gause principle” (Chase & Leibold, 2003; G.E. Hutchinson, 1978).

Revolutionary definition and quantification of the niche concept was done by Hutchinson following all of above mentioned early uses, simulations studies and defining efforts. As stated by Chase and Leibold (2003), Hutchinson’s niche definition first presented in 1944 stating that “The term niche (in Gause’s sense, rather than Elton’s) is here defined as the sum of all the environmental factors acting on the organism; the niche thus defined is a region of an n-dimensional hyper-space.” G. E. Hutchinson (1957), now referred as classic paper in ecology “concluding remarks” presented at the Cold Springs Harbor Symposium of Quantitative Biology, further refined his original idea and transformed “n-dimensional hyper-space” to “n-dimensional hypervolume”.