| Summary: | Environmental heterogeneity has often been suggested as a general explanation for patterns of diversity at scales ranging from individuals within populations to communities within landscapes. I evaluate this proposition using laboratory experiments with two microbial species, the unicellular chlorophyte Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and the common bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens. These experiments contrast the fate of diversity following selection in heterogeneous and homogeneous environments. Specifically, I show that (1) an individual's breadth of adaptation evolves to match the amount of environmental variation, specialists evolving in environments that remain constant through time and generalists evolving in environments that vary through time irrespective of the scale at which environmental variation occurs relative to the lifetime of an individual; (2) the maintenance of diversity in a spatially heterogeneous environment is context-dependent, diversity being more readily maintained when environmental conditions are very different and genotypes are widely divergent; (3) selection in heterogeneous environments represents a plausible mechanism for two well-known patterns of diversity at large spatial scales, namely that between species diversity and both productivity and disturbance. This thesis thus demonstrates that environmental heterogeneity is a plausible, and perhaps very general, factor responsible for the diversity of natural communities.
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