An ecological niche is the role and position a species has in its environment, including how it meets its needs for food and shelter, how it survives, and how it reproduces. It is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition, describing how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors and how it in turn alters those same factors. The concept of ecological niche is central to ecological biogeography, which focuses on spatial patterns of ecological communities.

Some key points about ecological niche include:

• Range of conditions: A species niche encompasses both the physical and environmental factors that influence the species. It describes the specific segment of ecospace occupied by a single species.

• Adaptive dimension: No two species are identical in all respects, and the competitive exclusion principle means that some resource or adaptive dimension will provide a niche specific to each species.

• Hypervolume: The niche of a species can be defined as an n-dimensional hypervolume or hyperspace of environmental variables.

• Influence on environment: The niche of a species can also describe how it alters competition and the distribution of resources in its environment.

Overall, the ecological niche is an important concept in ecology that helps us understand how species interact with their environment and with each other.