We have developed this website in the hope that it will prove a valuable resource for the community of academics, students and other individuals interested in the topic of niche construction. It is designed to provide an accessible introduction to the subject of niche construction, explaining what it is and how it is being used across multiple academic fields.
There are now over 1,500 articles published on niche construction across various fields, from evolutionary biology and ecology to anthropology and philosophy, and the complexity and diversity of this research can make the topic challenging to navigate.
We cannot possibly feature all of these articles so please forgive us if we have not mentioned your favourite study. Designing and producing the content for this website has been a huge undertaking and it is more content rich that most comparable sites. Nonetheless, if you do detect an egregious omission please don’t hesitate to let us know, and maybe we will be able to incorporate it.
If you have recently written on niche construction, tell us about your work, and we will try to tweet about it from @EES_update. Our hope is that a flavour of what is genuinely exciting about niche construction comes across in the website’s pages, that it starts to become widely used, and eventually becomes cherished by the community.
Together with Kevin Laland and Marcus Feldman, Odling-Smee began the first systematic investigation of niche construction. The team documented and categorized the extent of niche construction in livingorganisms, devised methods by which its ecological and evolutionary consequences could be investigated, and derived dedicated theory to explore these questions (Odling-Smee et al. 1996, 2003; Laland et al. 1996, 1999).
The following colleagues gave us valuable input and feedback (in alphabetical order): Christian Dorninger, Marc Feldman, Laurel Fogarty, Scott F. Gilbert, Jeremy Kendal, Armin Moczek, Gerd Mueller, Mike O’Brien, Adrian Stencel, Sonia Sultan, Mark M. Tanaka, Rose G. Trappes, Tobias Uller, Sophie Veigl, Melinda Zeder.
We are also grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for financial support for the production of this website.
