Bringing the Hutchinsonian niche into the 21st century: Ecological and evolutionary perspectives

G. Evelyn Hutchinson more than a half century ago proposed that one could characterize the ecological niche of a species as an abstract mapping of population dynamics onto an environmental space, the axes of which are abiotic and biotic factors that influence birth and death rates. If a habitat has conditions within a species' niche, a population should persist without immigration from external sources, whereas if conditions are outside the niche, it faces extinction. Analyses of species' niches are essential to understanding controls on species' geographical range limits and how these limits might shift in our rapidly changing world. Recent developments in ecology and evolutionary biology suggest it is time…