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Toward an ecological synthesis: a case for habitat selection

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Abstract

Habitat selection, and its associated density and frequency-dependent evolution, has a profound influence on such vital phenomena as population regulation, species interactions, the assembly of ecological communities, and the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Different strategies of habitat selection, and their importance in ecology and evolution, can often be revealed simply by plots of density in adjacent habitats. For individual species, the strategies are closely intertwined with mechanisms of population regulation, and with the persistence of populations through time. For interacting species, strategies of habitat selection are not only responsible for species coexistence, but provide one of the most convenient mechanisms for measuring competition, and the various community structures caused by competitive interactions. Other kinds of interactions, such as those between predators and prey, demonstrate that an understanding of the coevolution of habitat-selection strategies among strongly interacting species is essential to properly interpret their spatial and temporal dynamics. At the evolutionary scale, the frequency dependence associated with habitat selection may often allow populations to diverge and diversify into separate species. Habitat selection thereby demonstrates how we can map microevolutionary strategies in behavior onto their population and community consequences, and from there, onto macroevolutionary patterns of speciation and adaptive radiation. We can anticipate that future studies of habitat selection will not only help us complete those maps, but that they will also continue to enrich the panoply of ideas that shape evolutionary ecology.

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Acknowledgements

I thank R. Monson for inviting this review, R. Holt and an anonymous reviewer for helpful candid suggestions on improvement, and Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council for its continuing support of my research in evolutionary ecology. No review can do justice to the lifetimes of hard and thoughtful work that make progress in science. I hope that my selective choice of topics and examples will point readers to the rich and varied literature that molded my ideas on habitat and habitat selection. My research would have been impossible without the help of many dedicated assistants, and a loving family. I thank you all.

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Correspondence to Douglas W. Morris.

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Morris, D.W. Toward an ecological synthesis: a case for habitat selection. Oecologia 136, 1–13 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-003-1241-4

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