The niche is important

The ecological niche is a foundational concept in ecology. Based on the french word nicher (for "nest"), it is a theoretical construct used to describe how an organism or species fits into its environment. The niche is generally attributed to a publication by Joseph Grinnell in 1917, and was further defined by Charles Elton in 1927 and G. Evelyn Hutchinson in 1957. I will save a discussion of what is a niche and how its definition has changed through time for a future blog post. Today, I want to focus on the importance of the niche in the ecological literature.

To examine this, I searched Web of Science for publications with "niche" as a topic. I looked at how the number of publications with the topic "niche" has changed through time and how this change is related to the total number of ecological publications. I searched over the years 1957 to 2010, to identify changes in the importance of the niche since Hutchinson's publication.

More "niche" publications


As seen in the figure above, the number of publications indexed by Web of Science with the topic "niche" have grown dramatically (pretty much exponentially) since 1957. This could be because the niche is becoming more important, or it could just be an artifact of the number of journal articles that are indexed on Web of Science.

To account for this issue, I looked at the fraction of "niche" publications in ecological journals, to provide an index of the number of ecological publications that examine niche ideas.

Is "niche" becoming more important in ecology?


Yes, it is. For the above data, I searched for the number of publications with the "niche" topic in 20 top journals for the field of ecology (based on impact factor: Publication Name=(Ecology Letters OR Global Ecology and Biogeography OR Global Change Biology OR Ecological Monographs OR American Naturalist OR Proceedings of the Royal Society B OR Journal of Ecology OR Conservation Biology OR Functional Ecology OR Ecology OR Ecography OR Diversity and Distributions OR Journal of Applied Ecology OR Journal of Biogeography OR Ecological Applications OR Ecosystems OR Oikos OR Oecologia OR Journal of Animal Ecology OR Journal of Plant Ecology)). I divided the resulting number by the total number of publications for those 20 journals.

The fraction tells us about the relative importance of the "niche" in ecology. Interestingly, this fraction increases as well. It is not quite exponential, but it is definitely a dramatic increase in recent years, with now over 5% of publications in ecology journals examining niche topics.

The niche is a very important idea in ecology. It seems to be growing in importance. This is likely because of the relevance of the niche for addressing questions of environmental change, which are particularly "hip" in ecology right now. Additionally, niche topics are growing in use in other subjects, such as geography and evolution, which could be encouraging an increase of its examination in ecology as well.

How have the ideas of the niche evolved through time? Are current uses of "niche" ecologically accurate? Are "niche" ideas useful for other subjects besides biology? These are questions that I will examine in the future.