Organisms modify the selection that they experience both through physically changing their environments (‘perturbational niche construction’) and habitat choice (‘relocational niche construction’).
Their activities can create novel selection (‘inceptive niche construction’) or respond to existing selection (‘counteractive niche construction’). An additional category, "experiential niche construction," refers to the ways organisms alter their experiences of the environment without changing it.
The defining characteristic of niche construction is not organism-driven modification of the environment per se (a special case known as perturbational niche construction), but rather modification of the organism’s niche (that is, modification of the relationship between the organism and its environment). Hence the term ‘niche construction’ includes such cases as dispersal, migration and habitat selection, where organisms relocate in space to modify both the environments that they leave and that they enter (known as relocational niche construction).
If an environmental factor is already changing, or has changed, organisms may oppose or cancel out that change, a process labelled counteractive niche construction. For instance, many wasps and bees will engage in temperature regulation of their nests, heating it up through muscular activity in the cold, and placing droplets of water on the surface, allowing it to cool through evaporation, in the heat. Counteractive niche construction is therefore conservative or stabilizing, and it functions to buffer organisms from shifts in factors away from states to which they have been adapted.
Organisms can also make adjustments that change their experience of the environment, without changing the environment itself (experiential niche construction) (Sultan 2015, Chiu 2019). For instance, penguins huddle to keep warm, whilst plants shift the orientation of their leaves to maximize input from the sun .
Odling-Smee FJ, Laland KN, Feldman MW 2003. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press An authoritative, rigorous and extensive introduction to niche construction theory.
Sultan SE 2015. Organism & environment: Ecological development, niche construction, and adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press The most up-to-date authoritative and comprehensive treatment of niche construction, packed with empirical examples, particularly in plants and animals.
