How did a City boy from Singapore come to love the many wonders of nature? So much that he dedicated his life's career to unraveling it? Well, its thanks to people like Sir David Attenborough, who among many others, brought the world to me. Happy 100th boss!
This builds on a long lineage—from Hutchinson’s niche hypervolume to Maguire’s demographic perspective and Grubb’s regeneration niche—but brings these ideas together into a unified framework.
In that sense, the niche is a demographic construct. Defined by the conditions under which combinations of vital rates can sustain population persistence (non-negative population growth rates).
Crucially, these vital rates don’t vary independently. Trade-offs, covariation, and shared environmental drivers mean that their combined effects on population dynamics are inherently non-additive.
*but demography seldom examines these covariation along env gradients
This means the ecological niche is not directly observed, but arises from the interaction of demographic processes (survival, reproduction, development), rather than any single response.
*we neglect this when we only look at presence-absence or population abundance or trends!
The shift here is recognising that the niche is not a primitive property of organisms, but an emergent product of multiple vital rates—each responding differently across environments and through time.
The niche concept explains where species can persist—but not always why.
Integrating old, near forgotten ideas with modern demography, the Demographic Niche Concept provides a process-based foundation for understanding niches and distributions.
nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Excited to see @seh-pang.bsky.social new @ecography.bsky.social paper out: a timely formalisation of the demographic niche concept, linking niche theory with vital rates to better understand range-wide population dynamics and #globalchange responses 🌿♨️🌍 #speciesdistributions #demography #ecology
It also raises a broader question…
How often do we infer ecological patterns without fully accounting for the demographic processes that generate them?
How much will these inferred patterns change when we consider the Demographic Niche Concept?