I'm reading an article that talks about morphospace and niche expansion or packing.
Differences in slope above and below zero indicate dominance of morphospace expansion versus morphospace packing, respectively.
What do the terms mean? What's the difference?
The way I understand it is that morphospace expansion is the change in morphology from the perspective of a population, but morphospace packing is, from the perspective of the ecosystem, the process where organisms are occupying the ecosystem space entirely so that no niche are available anymore. Is that correct?
The "packing" seems to refer to the density of the different "regions" of morphospace. Or said differently, you could "pack" different morphotypes in an environment. Is this a probable explanation?
I haven't found an answer looking at the history and definitions of niche.