Abstract
AbstractAs most species live in seasonal environments, considering varying conditions is essential to understand species dynamics in both geographic and ecological spaces. Both resident and migratory species need to contend with seasonality and balance settling in favorable areas with tracking favorable environmental conditions during the year. We present an exploratory framework to jointly investigate a species' niche in geographic and ecological spaces, applied to wood storks (Mycteria americana), which are partially migratory wading birds, in the southeastern United States. We concurrently described monthly geographic distributions and climatic niches based on temperature and precipitation. Geographic distributions of wood storks were more similar throughout the year than were climatic niches, suggesting that birds stay within specific areas seasonally, rather than tracking areas of similar climate. However, wood storks expressed consistent selection of warm areas during the winter, and wet areas during the summer, indicating that the selection of seasonal ranges may be directly related to environmental conditions across the entire range. Our flexible framework, which simultaneously considered geographic and ecological spaces, suggested that tracking climate alone did not explain seasonal distributions of wood storks in breeding and non‐breeding areas.
Highlights
At the core of ecology is the question of where do animals live? Early on, ecologists acknowledged the dual nature of this issue, by investigating species ranges, and species ecological niches, reflecting what has been termed “Hutchinson’s duality” (Colwell and Rangel2009)
Similarity in the geographic range between any two months was always greater than 50 %, with minima reached between the months of January–February and July–September
We investigated seasonal similarity in both geographic space and ecological space of the partially migratory wood storks in the southeastern
Summary
At the core of ecology is the question of where do animals live? Early on, ecologists acknowledged the dual nature of this issue, by investigating species ranges (i.e., their location in geographic space, Candolle 1855, Darwin 1859, Wallace 1876), and species ecological niches (i.e., their location in ecological space, Grinnell 1917, Hutchinson 1957), reflecting what has been termed “Hutchinson’s duality” (Colwell and Rangel2009). The dynamic nature of both spaces in time—i.e., their seasonality—often goes unacknowledged, despite the fact that most species live in seasonal environments (Fretwell 1972), with strongly cyclic variations in resource availability and conditions throughout the year. Broennimann et al (2011) proposed a framework to quantify niche overlap using essentially kernel overlap metrics in a simplified 2-dimensional niche. Relying on this framework, several studies investigated seasonality in ecological niches: for instance, Laube et al (2015) estimated overlap between breeding and non-breeding niches of warblers, while Gómez et al (2016) investigated seasonal niche overlap of passerine birds
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