No need for niches in new ecology

Abstract

The concept of ‘niche’ has been extensively used to explain ecological patterns. However, the concept has been defined differently and is continuously under discussion. Does the concept truly help ecology become the predictive science we urgently need to stop the decline of biodiversity? To find an answer to this question, we discuss recent developments in ecological thinking based on agency, information, and complexity.

The ecological agent, usually referred to as an organism, continuously and autonomously decides how to act based on processing information that it collects from within—its experience and current state—and from its environment. The collective decisions of all organisms in a community together result in ecological patterns. These patterns may not always align with the patterns that humans perceive in the environment. This new approach to ecology implies a non-deterministic view of ecosystems, which are constantly changing at all levels of scale.

Community ecology would become an explanatory science if it could predict ecological patterns based on the information available to organisms and how these decide to act based on that information. We argue that the concept of the niche is tied to traditional thinking rooted in a deterministic worldview about static ecosystems, which includes a fixed distribution of organisms in space and time. In the new ecological approach, the niche is no longer useful for accurate predictions of ecological patterns. However, we believe that new developments in machine learning – AI - may be helpful, given the vast amount of information involved in these predictions.