Niche apportionment models

Niche apportionment models are ecological frameworks that describe how species divide up a shared resource pool in multi-dimensional space, which in turn determines how abundance is distributed among the species living together in a community. Their central purpose is explaining relative species abundance, the proportion of individuals or biomass that each species contributes to a community, a pattern usually visualized with a Whittaker plot that ranks species by abundance on a logarithmic scale. The approach grew out of ecologist Robert MacArthur's dissatisfaction with treating species abundance patterns as purely statistical artifacts; he proposed picturing ecological niches as pieces of a broken stick, each piece representing the niche space occupied by one species in the community. Later ecologists, notably Tokeshi, expanded this stick-breaking idea into roughly seven distinct mechanistic models, each offering a different explanation for how resources are actually partitioned among species, and the models remain in use for taxa as different as freshwater insects and plant communities. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/