INTEGRATING SPECIES NICHE WITH ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABILITY: A THEORETICAL MODELING APPROACH

Abstract

Understanding species niche is vital to prevent species extinction as it has a great impact on the abundance of the species. The present study was conducted to determine the changes of species niche with the changes in environmental variability. Here species dynamics over the time was simulated using a dynamic population model within in a parameter range. The findings of the present study revealed that changes environmental variance affects the abundance of species, alter their mean niche position, and change the niche overlap pattern with each other as well as the niche width of species. Similarly, it has a great impact on competition among the species. It was found that at low environmental variance there has been less fluctuation in the abundance of various species, but when the variance is being increased gradually then the abundance also fluctuates more. Again, at low variance the position niche of species remained more or less in the same mean, but at high variance the mean niche of species become changed, so their niche position has also been changed. Over again, when the environmental noise was low then the niche overlap of the species was very high. At high variance the niche overlap decreased. When two species compete for the same limiting resource then overlap occurs. Hence, when environmental variance was very low, the niche width of species was also very low, which indicates that the lower the variance the narrower the niche width. Furthermore, when the variance was low then there was no competition but with the increasing of variance, the rate of competition was also increased. Finally, the study concluded that change in the environmental variability affects the community dynamics and species niche structure.