The concept of niche width or niche breadth refers essentially to the diversity' of resource use shown by any one organism or group of organisms.
Those whose resources use is restricted to a small portion of the available resource spectrum are considered to have narrow niches, those which exploit a relatively diverse set of resources within the resource continuum are defined with broad niches.
They note that 'there are two situations in which one might wish to compare niche metrics: among species within communities, and between species of different communities. In both cases the paramount difficulty is standardization of the procedure so that measurements are comparable for different species and different communities]' [our addition], Colwell and Futuyma develop further measures of niche breadth, which are reconsidered and refined by Hurlbert (1978), but these become rather complex for general use. Other measures are suggested by Feinsinger et. al., (1981) or Thorman (198