Process Of Niche Construction Research Articles

Niche construction by two ectomycorrhizal truffle species (Tuber aestivum and T. melanosporum)

Niche construction by biota has been frequently reported for animals and plants, but fungi have received less attention. For mycorrhizal fungi, mutualistic niche construction has been proposed where partners construct niches for each other. However, few eco-evolutionary mechanisms leading to mutualistic symbiotic feedback have been described. Here we report niche construction by two ectomycorrhiza-forming species of truffles, Tuber aestivum and T. melanosporum. The soils of 263 spots of these Tuber, which create bare patches (brûlés), have been monitored (9–10 years) in natural forests to analyze whether they meet the criteria to satisfy the mutualistic niche construction process. Soil habitat modification by these Tuber can be seen in their brûlés, where the vegetation of arbuscular mycorrhizal plants and soil organisms are largely suppressed. Tuber melanosporum brûlés were smaller more productive, and with lower vegetation cover than T. aestivum. Interactions among soil carbonates, pH, and brûlé size are associated with increased carpophore productivity, indicating positive feedback between habitat modification and fungal fitness. Both species modified the habitat differentially. Tuber aestivum brûlés had higher pH and lower total carbonate than soils outside. Tuber melanosporum brûlés had lower total carbonate and higher exchangeable Ca2+ and active carbonate than soils outside. In conclusion, brûlés show a mutualistic niche construction process because modifies their soil environment and increases the fitness of both Tuber spp. Enhanced carbonate weathering by truffles resulted in lower soil quality with a negative impact on plants, indicating that mutualistic niche construction does not equally benefit both partners.

Social-ecological niche construction for sustainability: understanding destructive processes and exploring regenerative potentials.

Through the exponential expansion of human activities, humanity has become the driving force of global environmental change. The consequent global sustainability crisis has been described as a result of a uniquely human form of adaptability and niche construction. In this paper, we introduce the concept of social-ecological niche construction focusing on biophysical interactions and outcomes. We use it to address destructive processes and to discuss potential regenerative ones as ways to overcome them. From a niche construction point of view, the increasing disconnections between human activities and environmental feedbacks appear as a success story in the history of human-nature coevolution because they enable humans to expand activities virtually without being limited by environmental constraints. However, it is still poorly understood how suppressed environmental feedbacks affect future generations and other species, or which lock-ins and self-destructive dynamics may unfold in the long-term. This is crucial as the observed escape from natural selection requires growing energy input and represents a temporal deferral rather than an actual liberation from material limitations. Relying on our proposal, we conclude that, instead of further taming nature, there is need to explore the potential of how to tame socio-metabolic growth and impact in niche construction processes. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis'.

DISTINCTIVELY HUMAN? MEANING‐MAKING AND WORLD SHAPING AS CORE PROCESSES OF THE HUMAN NICHE

AbstractPart of the task in studying human evolution is developing a deep understanding of what we share, and do not share, with other life, as a mammal, a primate, a hominin, and as members of the genus Homo. A key aspect of this last facet is gained via the examination of the genus Homo across the Pleistocene. By at least the later Pleistocene members of the genus Homo began to habitually insert shared meaning into and onto their world forming one of the bases of contemporary human abilities to develop a distinctive human niche and human culture. Meaning‐laden cultural dynamics constitute the core of a ubiquitous semiotic ecosystem, which in turn structures the architecture of the complex niches and niche construction processes that characterize humanity today. Here, I offer a summary of Pleistocene evolution of the genus Homo and an argument for when and how that extensive and distinctive capacities for shared meaning‐making and a particularly dynamic niche construction emerged.

The emergence of habitual spaces in the Early Holocene Island Environment: Soil micromorphological investigation at the Neolithic Gosanri Site, Jeju, South Korea

The emergence of residential space can be ephemeral in archaeological records, despite its importance as an indicator of the degree of mobility and sedentism. With the discovery of a sunken feature filled with artifacts and an area encircled with postholes, the Gosanri site can provide a glimpse of domestic structures in the Early Holocene (10,000–8,000 cal. BP). This site documents the earliest pottery and grinding stone tool technology in Korea, indicating the peopling to Jeju Island. This paper presents a soil micromorphological analysis on this sunken feature as a pilot study to understanding its geogenic and anthropogenic characteristics. The results suggest that the sunken structure was modified by trampling activity, possibly indicating the earliest case for inhabitation of subterranean structures in Korea. Along with other archaeological evidence and environmental conditions, our study suggests that Gosanri was a camp for quarrying tuff from a nearby source, with stone tool production likely occurring during the less windy seasons. This raises the possibility that the early islanders seasonally moved between several base camps without permanent settlements across Jeju. This can be categorized as a ‘residential mobility pattern’, as conceptualized by L. Binford. This survey implies that the inhabitation structure, regarded as the key element in the niche construction process, began to emerge in the Early Holocene. Our pilot study lays the foundation for future geoarchaeological research at Gosanri.

Modeling a primate technological niche

The ability to modify the environment through the transport of tools has been instrumental in shaping the evolutionary success of humans. Understanding the cause-and-effect relationships between hominin behavior and the environment ultimately requires understanding of how the archaeological record forms. Observations of living primates can shed light on these interactions by investigating how tool-use behaviors produce a material record within specific environmental contexts. However, this requires reconciling data derived from primate behavioral observations with the time-averaged nature of the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record. Here, we use an agent-based model to investigate how repeated short-distance transport events, characteristic for primate tool use, can result in significant landscape-scale patterning of material culture over time. Our results illustrate the conditions under which accumulated short-distance transport bouts can displace stone tools over long distances. We show that this widespread redistribution of tools can also increase access to tool require resources over time. As such, these results elucidate the niche construction processes associated with this pattern of tool transport. Finally, the structure of the subsequent material record largely depends on the interaction between tool transport and environmental conditions over time. Though these results have implications for inferring hominin tool transports from hominin archaeological assemblages. Furthermore, they highlight the difficulties with connecting specific behavioral processes with the patterning in the archaeological record.

The Macroevolutionary Consequences of Niche Construction in Microbial Metabolism.

Microorganisms display a stunning metabolic diversity. Understanding the origin of this diversity requires understanding how macroevolutionary processes such as innovation and diversification play out in the microbial world. Metabolic networks, which govern microbial resource use, can evolve through different mechanisms, e.g., horizontal gene transfer or de novo evolution of enzymes and pathways. This process is governed by a combination of environmental factors, selective pressures, and the constraints imposed by the genetic architecture of metabolic networks. In addition, many independent results hint that the process of niche construction, by which organisms actively modify their own and each other’s niches and selective pressures, could play a major role in microbial innovation and diversification. Yet, the general principles by which niche construction shapes microbial macroevolutionary patterns remain largely unexplored. Here, we discuss several new hypotheses and directions, and suggest metabolic modeling methods that could allow us to explore large-scale empirical genotype-phenotype-(G-P)-environment spaces in order to study the macroevolutionary effects of niche construction. We hope that this short piece will further stimulate a systematic and quantitative characterization of macroevolutionary patterns and processes in microbial metabolism.

Using Deer Stable Isotope Data to Test a Niche Construction Hypothesis for an Increase in Prehistoric Human Maize Consumption in the Eastern Woodlands of the United States

ABSTRACT Pollen records and macrobotanical remains indicate maize was grown minimally during the Middle Woodland (200 BCE - CE 500) in eastern North America. However, previous isotopic studies have found limited evidence of its consumption by people in archaeobotanical assemblages. Hypothetically, if deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmermann) were feeding on maize (Zea mays L.) in gardens prior to its adoption as a human dietary staple, this may indicate a niche construction process which would later lead to shifts in hunting strategies. This construction of garden spaces or niches has implications for decreased mobility and greater investment in garden crops. To evaluate this hypothesis in the Ohio River Valley, we measured stable nitrogen (δ15N) and carbon (δ13C) isotope compositions of bulk collagen in deer bones (N = 25) from archaeological sites spanning the Middle Woodland (200 BCE - CE 400/500) to Late Precontact (CE 1400-1630). Our hypothesis was not confirmed: little (one deer of 19) evidence for maize consumption occurred in the analyzed deer remains. Five deer of 19 did indicate the possibility of feeding in deeply wooded areas, reflecting canopy effect. Dog (Canis lupus familiaris L.) bone samples (N = 2) were also analyzed for these isotopes and one indicates some consumption of maize.

Narrative niche construction: memory ecologies and distributed narrative identities

Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. In short, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology scaffolds our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction.

Anthropogenic climate change as a monumental niche construction process: background and philosophical aspects

Climate change has historically been an evolutionary determinant for our species, affecting both hominin evolutionary innovations and extinction rates, and the early waves of migration and expansion outside Africa. Today Homo sapiens has turned itself into a major geological force, able to cause a biodiversity crisis comparable to previous mass extinction events, shaping the Earth surface and impacting biogeochemical cycles and the climate at a global level. We argue that anthropogenically-driven climate change must be understood in terms of a monumental niche construction process, generating long-term ecological inheritance and eco-evolutionary feedbacks that are putting our health and well-being and those of future generations at risk. We then list five major sources of climate change counter-intuitiveness, highlighting how evolved cognitive biases and heuristics may stand in the way of providing effective responses within tight deadlines. Drawing on our framing of the climate breakdown, we finally call for an evolutionary perspective in approaching the adaptive challenge posed by climate change: we argue that putting the brakes on a genuine self-endangering evolutionary trap ultimately depends on our counteractive niche constructing abilities, played at the level of our institutional and innovation capacity.

Existence of solutions and numerical approximation of a non-local tumor growth model.

In order to model the evolution of a heterogeneous population of cancer stem cells and tumor cells, we analyse a nonlinear system of integro-differential equations. We provide an existence and uniqueness result by exploiting a suitable iterative scheme of functions which converge to the solution of the system. Then, we discretize the model and perform some numerical simulations. Numerical approximations are obtained by applying finite differences for space discretization and an exponential Runge-Kutta scheme for time integration. We exploit the numerical tool in order to investigate the effects that niches have on cancer development. In this respect, the numerical procedure is applied in the case when the function of cell redistribution is assumed to be spatially explicit. It allows for finding an approximate solution which is spatially inhomogeneous as time progresses. In this framework, numerical investigation may help in understanding the process of niche construction, which plays an important role in cancer population biology.

The Role of Pleiotropy in the Evolutionary Maintenance of Positive Niche Construction.

Organisms often modify their environments to their advantage through a process of niche construction. Environments that are improved through positive niche construction can be viewed as a public good. If free riders appear that do not contribute to the shared resource and therefore do not incur any associated costs, the constructed niche may become degraded, resulting in a tragedy of the commons and the extinction of niche constructors. Niche construction can persist if free riders are excluded, for example, if niche constructors monopolize the resource they produce to a sufficient degree. We suggest, however, that the problem of free riders remains because it is possible that nonniche constructors with an enhanced ability to access the resource appear and invade a population of constructors. Using mathematical models we show that positive niche construction can be maintained if it is inextricably linked to a mechanism that makes free riding costly, such as a trait that confers a benefit to only niche constructors. We discuss this finding in terms of genetic interactions and illustrate the principle with a two-locus model. We conclude that positive niche construction can both evolve and be maintained when it has other beneficial effects via pleiotropy. This situation may apply generally to the evolutionary maintenance of cooperation.

Psychological Science as a Complex System: Report Card

Psychological science is increasingly diverse in the tools available for research and the questions it is able to ask. But this potential is seriously limited by a lack of diversity in study populations, in situations and contexts explored, and in the researchers themselves. The current situation is problematic and difficult to change because of niche construction processes that favor the status quo. Systems level changes are needed to support a healthy psychological science.

Ideal-Type Narratives for Engineering a Human Niche

Humans have built an anthropocentric biogeosphere; called: ‘human niche’. Global change is part of this historical process of niche construction, which implies the intersection of the biogeosphere and the sphere of human activities of social, economic, cultural, and political natures. To construct these intersections, modern-day societies deploy ‘engineered systems’ and build narratives to frame these activities with purpose. This essay describes: (i) perceptions of what ‘engineered systems’ are about, (ii) their context such as global change, human agency, and societal implications of applied geosciences, and (iii) related narratives on how to handle global change through the design of ‘engineered systems’. Subsequently, regarding underpinning insights, it is shown that they: (i) are well-known, were used in the past, and now may be applied to handle global change; (ii) enshrine a distinct choice on how human activities and the biogeosphere shall intersect; and (iii) can be described by a simple ideal-type scheme, which does not require detailed scientific-technical understanding. Subsequently, it is illustrated how this ideal-type scheme leads to different narratives about what kind of ‘engineered systems’ are preferred. It is concluded that such ideal-type narratives for a messy world may help a lay-public to choose between options regarding how to handle global change.

Application of the Eco-field and General Theory of Resources to Bark Beetles: Beyond the Niche Construction Theory

A new approach to landscape ecology involves the application of the eco-field hypothesis and the General Theory of Resources. In this study, we describe the putative eco-field of bark beetles as a spatial configuration with a specific meaning-carrier for every organism-resource interaction. Bark beetles are insects with key roles in matter and energy cycles in coniferous forests, which cause significant changes to forestry landscapes when outbreaks occur. Bark beetles are guided towards host trees by the recognition of semiotic signals using a specific eco-field. These signals mainly comprise a group of scents, which are called the odourtope. Their interactions with other organisms (fungi, bacteria, nematodes, predators, etc.) occur by sharing relevant information from the eco-field networks (representamen networks) in the forest ecosystem. The eco-field networks modulate the expansion of the realized semiotic niche of the bark beetle towards the potential semiotic niche. Moreover, the niche construction process can be initiated by interchanging signals among species living in the same place, where these signals allow the exploitation of the required resources. If different organisms are interdependent on signals in eco-field networks, then this process may result in the establishment of mutualistic relationships. This is an example of how evolutionary processes are initiated by the recognition of signals in a network of eco-fields.

Historical and Current Niche Construction in an Anthropogenic Biome: Old Cultural Landscapes in Southern Scandinavia

Conceptual advances in niche construction theory provide new perspectives and a tool-box for studies of human-environment interactions mediating what is termed anthropogenic biomes. This theory is useful also for studies on how anthropogenic biomes are perceived and valued. This paper addresses these topics using an example: “old cultural landscapes” in Scandinavia, i.e., landscapes formed by a long, dynamic and continuously changing history of management. Today, remnant habitats of this management history, such as wooded pastures and meadows, are the focus of conservation programs, due to their rich biodiversity and cultural and aesthetic values. After a review of historical niche construction processes, the paper examines current niche construction affecting these old cultural landscapes. Features produced by historical niche construction, e.g., landscape composition and species richness, are in the modern society reinterpreted to become values associated with beauty and heritage and species’ intrinsic values. These non-utilitarian motivators now become drivers of new niche construction dynamics, manifested as conservation programs. The paper also examines the possibility to maintain and create new habitats, potentially associated with values emanating from historical landscapes, but in transformed and urbanized landscapes.

Rethinking the theory of evolution: New perspectives on human evolution and why it matters for Theology

This article addresses the issue of human imagination from the perspective of ‘niche construction’ in the wider discussion about ‘what makes us human’ and what it means to be a ‘self’, specifically for the Christian faith and for theology. In the article, a brief review of human origins and human evolution demonstrates the path and substantive impact of changes in behaviour, life histories and bodies in our human ancestors and us as humans ourselves. In the interactive process of niche construction, potentially changeable natural environments were, and are, acting continuously on variation in the gene pools of populations, and in this way gene pools were modified over generations. It is argued that a distinctively human imagination is part of the explanation for human evolutionary success and can be seen as one of the structurally significant aspects of the transition from earlier members of the genus Homo to ourselves as we are today. There is thus a naturalness to human imagination, even to religious imagination, that facilitates engagement with the world that is truly distinct. This provides fruitful addition to the toolkit of inquiry for both evolutionary scientists and interdisciplinary theologians interested in reconstructing the long, winding historical path to humanity.

Stone tool transport by wild Burmese long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis aurea)

Archaeologists have used stone transport as a proxy to understand a variety of cognitive, logistical and social problems faced by human ancestors. In the same way, tool transport in our close relatives, non-human primates, has been seen as an important indicator of material selection proclivities, and as a contributing factor to the formation of activity sites as part of niche construction processes. Non-human primate transport behaviour also assists in framing evolutionary scenarios for the emergence of stone tool use in the hominin lineage. Here, we present the first study of directly observed stone tool transport in wild and unhabituated Burmese long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis aurea) in Thailand. These macaques were observed during intertidal foraging activities, during which they pound open hard-shelled molluscs with stone tools. We recorded 2449 transport bouts, when a long-tailed macaque carried a stone tool from one prey target to the next, and found that on average the same tool was used to sequentially consume nine prey items in each foraging episode. The maximum number of prey items consumed in a single episode was 63. We found that tools used to open sessile oysters typically were used to consume more prey per episode than those employed on motile prey, and females transported tools further than males. Heavier tools (>200g) were rarely transported more than a few metres, but the longest transport distance was over 87m. Importantly for primate archaeological analysis of macaque tool use sites, we found that the median transport distance was 0.5m, meaning that tools are very often used in the immediate vicinity of the place they were collected by a macaque.

Litterfall as a niche construction process in a northern hardwood forest

Northern hardwood forests can exhibit considerable temporal stability in their species composition, which litterfall may help to maintain by modifying the soil environment to create an ecological inheritance. We evaluated the evidence for this niche‐construction perspective by carrying out a spatially explicit analysis of redistribution of calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), and potassium (K) via leaf litterfall of the six dominant tree species in a temperate forest in northwest Connecticut, USA. We combined stem maps with litterfall measurements to fit models of leaf litterfall for individual species, and we chemically analyzed leaves, surface soil extractions, and unweathered soil particles.Analysis of elemental oxides in unweathered soil particles suggested that species did not differ in ability to gain access to rock‐bound nutrients. Nevertheless, species had a significant effect on quantity of Ca cycled in litter—the two calcicoles (species with affinity for calcium‐rich soils) occurred most commonly on the richest soils, and the Ca concentration in their senescent leaves increased sharply across the soil fertility gradient. No species effects on Mg or K redistribution were seen. Litter dispersal distances cut across calcium affinities: e.g., of the four calcifuges (plants with affinity for acidic soils) two had distant litter dispersal (modal dispersal distance ≥ 4 m) and two had close litter dispersal (modal dispersal distance < 0.3 m). Dispersal distance was associated with leaf size: the three species with the smallest leaves had the most concentrated litterfall shadows. One of these, eastern hemlock, has a recognized ability to exclude other species in part by creating an acidic low‐nutrient soil environment. Overall, the ability of trees to generate soil conditions that were aligned with their own resource use was expressed most clearly in the calcium content of their leaves. We concluded that tree‐environment interactions at the site displayed several of the criteria for niche construction.

Niche construction on environmental gradients: the formation of fitness valley and stratified genotypic distributions.

The process of niche construction can alter the trajectory of natural selection through organism-environment feedback. As such, the mechanism and impact of niche construction can be better investigated along environmental gradients. Here we investigate how the process of niche construction affects the distribution of genotypes and fitness landscape along an environmental gradient under three selection regimes, namely heterozygote superiority, genetic loci which dictates niche construction ability being either selectively neutral or non-neutral. Using a spatially explicit cellular automaton, we show that niche construction can stratify genetic diversity by forming band-like distributions consisting of different genotypic compositions and promote reproduction isolation by forming a divide with reduced average fitness along the gradients, termed a fitness valley. The band structure and the presence of a fitness valley depend on heterogeneous environments, resource-dependent fitness and the selection acting on the gene loci affecting the niche-constructing ability. Our work adds to the growing body of evidence on criticizing species distribution models which assume that the environment alone can determine species distributions. Based on the results, we argue that conservation planning should target preserving or restoring environmental gradients.

Behavioural manipulation of insect hosts by Baculoviridae as a process of niche construction

BackgroundNiche construction has received increasing attention in recent years as a vital force in evolution and examples of niche construction have been identified in a wide variety of taxa, but viruses are conspicuously absent. In this study we explore how niche construction can lead to viruses engineering their hosts (including behavioural manipulation) with feedback on selective pressures for viral transmission and virulence. To illustrate this concept we focus on Baculoviridae, a family of invertebrate viruses that have evolved to modify the feeding behaviour of their lepidopteran hosts and liquefy their cadavers as part of the course of infection.ResultsWe present a mathematical model showing how niche construction leads to feedback from the behavioural manipulation to the liquefaction of the host, linking the evolution of both of these traits, and show how this association arises from the action of niche construction. Model results show that niche construction is plausible in this system and delineates the conditions under which niche construction will occur. Niche construction in this system is also shown to be sensitive to parameter values that reflect ecological forces.ConclusionsOur model demonstrates that niche construction can be a potent force in viral evolution and can lead to the acquisition and maintenance of the behavioural manipulation and liquefaction traits in Baculoviridae via the niche constructing effects on the host. These results show the potential for niche construction theory to provide new insights into viral evolution.