Biology subjects

Yanco, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Yanco, S..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Scaling ecological niches from individuals to populations and beyond

The niche is a key concept that unifies ecology and evolutionary biology. However, empirical and theoretical treatments of the niche are mostly performed at the species level, neglecting individuals as important units of ecological and evolutionary processes. So far, a formal mathematical link between individual-level niches and higher organismal-level niches has been lacking, hampering the unification of ecological theories and more accurate forecasts of biodiversity change. To fill in this gap, we propose a bottom-up approach to derive population and higher organismal-level niches from individual niches. We demonstrate the power of our framework by showing that 1) the statistical properties of higher organismal-level niches (e.g. niche breadth, skewness etc.) can be partitioned into individual contributions; 2) the species-level niche shifts can be estimated by tracing the responses of individuals. Our method paves the way for a unifying niche theory and enables mechanistic assessments of organism-environment relationships across organismal scales.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Choices to landscapes: Mechanisms of animal movement scale to landscape patterns

Understanding the geographic distributions of animals is central to ecological inquiry and conservation planning. Movement-based habitat selection models offer a powerful tool for identifying preferred environmental attributes, yet applying these models to predict animal geographic distributions faces methodological and computational challenges. Here, we present a framework that integrates habitat selection and movement behaviors to generate landscape-scale space use predictions. Through simulations and empirical data, we demonstrate that combining local selection and movement dynamics yields highly accurate emergent spatial distribution predictions. Our framework outperforms occurrence-based frameworks across individual, population, and regional scales. By explicitly addressing the role of movement constraints and selection patterns in heterogeneous environments, our framework bridges animal movement and spatial distribution modeling in a scalable manner. This approach offers a new paradigm to link organism-environment interactions from individual space use to habitat connectivity and population distributions relevant to policy and conservation.

ecology↗