Tanaka Kenta

Abstract The concept of the ecological niche, defined as the basic habitat requirements for a species, is central to understanding species geographic distributions and predicting their responses to environmental change. However, identifying the essential niche for large regional communities remains a challenge because niche axes can be “hidden” by the complexity of the underlying ecological processes.

1 INTRODUCTION Changes in land-use have led to a significant decline and degradation of semi-natural grasslands around agricultural fields over the past century, attracting global attention (Foley et al., 2005; Newbold et al., 2015; Sala et al., 2000; Török & Dengler, 2018).