Niche construction is the ecological process by which an organism alters its own (or another species') local environment. These alterations can be a physical change to the organism's environment, or it can encompass the active movement of an organism from one habitat to another where it then experiences different environmental pressures. Examples of niche construction include the building of nests and burrows by animals, the creation of shade, the influencing of wind speed, and alternations to nutrient cycling by plants. Although these modifications are often directly beneficial to the constructor, they are not necessarily always. For example, when organisms dump detritus, they can degrade their own local environments. Within some biological evolutionary frameworks, niche construction can actively beget processes pertaining to ecological inheritance whereby the organism in question "constructs" new or unique ecologic, and perhaps even sociologic environmental realities characterized by specific selective pressures.

For niche construction to affect evolution it must satisfy three criteria: 1) the organism must significantly modify environmental conditions, 2) these modifications must influence one or more selection pressures on a recipient organism, and 3) there must be an evolutionary response in at least one recipient population caused by the environmental modification. The first two criteria alone provide evidence of niche construction.

Recently, some biologists have argued that niche construction is an evolutionary process that works in conjunction with natural selection. Evolution entails networks of feedbacks in which previously selected organisms drive environmental changes, and organism-modified environments subsequently select for changes in organisms. The complementary match between an organism and its environment results from the two processes of natural selection and niche construction. The effect of niche construction is especially pronounced in situations where environmental alterations persist for several generations, introducing the evolutionary role of ecological inheritance. This theory emphasizes that organisms inherit two legacies from their ancestors: genes and a modified environment. A niche constructing organism may or may not be considered an ecosystem engineer. Ecosystem engineering is a related but non-evolutionary concept referring to structural changes brought about in the environment by organisms.

The following are some examples of niche construction:

As creatures construct new niches, they can have a significant effect on the world around them.

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.