Measuring ecological niche overlap from occurrence and spatial environmental data

ABSTRACT Aim Concerns over how global change will influence species distributions, in conjunction with increased emphasis on understanding niche dynamics in evolutionary and community contexts, highlight the growing need for robust methods to quantify niche differences between or within taxa. We propose a statistical framework to describe and compare environmental niches from occurrence and spatial environmental data. Location Europe, North America and South America. Methods The framework applies kernel smoothers to densities of species occurrence in gridded environmental space to calculate metrics of niche overlap and test hypotheses regarding niche conservatism. We use this framework and simulated species…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• SN
  Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

  Awards: 226544, CRSII3_125240
• UO
  University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science