recurrence of traits across generations, has been found to depend critically on the construction of developmental environments such as nests by ancestral organisms. Ecological inheritance refers to the inherited resources and conditions, and associated modified selection pressures, that ancestral organisms bequeath to their descendants as a direct result of their niche construction. Niche construction has important implications for understanding, managing, and conserving ecosystems. History Niche construction theory (NCT) has been anticipated by diverse people in the past, including by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his What Is Life? and Mind and Matter essays (1944). An early advocate of the niche construction perspective in biology was the developmental biologist, Conrad Waddington. He drew his attention to the many ways in which animals modify their selective environments throughout their lives, by choosing and changing their environmental conditions, a phenomenon that he termed "the exploitive system". The niche construction perspective was subsequently brought to prominence through the writings of Harvard evolutionary biologist, Richard Lewontin. In the 1970s and 1980s Lewontin wrote a series of articles on adaptation, in which he pointed out that organisms do not passively adapt through selection to pre-existing conditions, but actively construct important components of their niches. Oxford biologist John Odling-Smee (1988) was the first person to coin the term 'niche construction', and the first to make the argument that ‘niche construction’ and ‘ecological inheritance’ should be recognized as evolutionary processes. Over the next decade research into niche construction increased rapidly, with a rush of experimental and theoretical studies across a broad range of fields. Modeling niche construction Mathematical evolutionary theory explores both the evolution of niche construction, and its evolutionary and ecological consequences. These analyses suggest that niche construction is of considerable importance. For instance, niche construction can: fix genes or phenotypes that would otherwise be deleterious, create or eliminate equilibria, and affect evolutionary rates; cause evolutionary time lags, generate momentum, inertia, autocatalytic effects, catastrophic responses to selection, and cyclical dynamics; drive niche-constructing traits to fixation by creating statistical associations with recipient traits; facilitate the evolution of cooperation; regulate environmental states, allowing persistence in otherwise inhospitable conditions, facilitating range expansion and affecting carrying capacities; drive coevolutionary events, exacerbate and ameliorate competition, affect the likelihood of coexistence and produce macroevolutionary trends. Humans Niche construction theory has had a particular impact in the human sciences, including biological anthropology, archaeology, and psychology. Niche construction is now recognized to have played important