Individual contribution to niche expansion in amphibians: A test of the niche variation hypothesis

The niche variation hypothesis (NVH) suggests that populations released from competition are able to expand their realized ecological niche (Van valen 1965; Bolnick et al. 2007). This increase in total niche width (TNW) can arise by i) increasing heterogeneity among individuals’ niche through individual specialization, i.e. inter-individual variation in resource use, (IS – Bolnick et al., 2002; 2003) occurring when different individuals of a population use a subset of the population’s resource pool, or ii) by expanding the niche of all individuals within the population (Bolnick et al. 2007). Although several morphological and phenotypical studies have confuted the NVH (e.g. Meiri et al. 2005), there is generally strong support for this hypothesis when behavioural or ecological traits are considered, and in particular when the trophic niche is measured at the individual level (Bolnick et al. 2007; Maldonado et al., 2017). In this study our primary aim is to corroborate the NVH, providing..., , The dataset consists of two files:
 

1)\"Data.csv\" - contains data used to perform the analysis and has 10 variables:
 

Species_ID_NCBI_Taxonomy - ID of the species, following NCBI Taxonomy, used to produce phylogenetic tree on PhyloT

Species_Name - Abbreviated species names

Family - Family of each species

Order - Order of each family

V - Inter-individual diet variation measure, as retrieved by published research or calculated from orgiginal data

TNW - Total niche width, as retrieved by published research or calculated from orgiginal data

PopID - ID of the population

Net_Primary_Productivity - Environmental predictor used in the analysis

Annu_Days_Foraging_Activity - Environmental predictor used in the analysis

Species_Richness - Environmental predictor used in the analysis
 

2)\"Phylogenetic_tree.txt\" - text file containing the phylogenetic tree as obtained from PhyloT