Spatial resource heterogeneity increases diversity and evolutionary potential

Spatial heterogeneity is believed to be an evolutionary driver of biodiversity. Variability in the distribution of resource patches can allow an environment to support a wider variety of phenotypes for selection to act upon at the ecosystem level, which may lead to more species. However, the generality of this principle has not been thoroughly tested, as the relevant adaptive dynamics occur on evolutionary timescales. We overcame this challenge by performing experiments on populations of digital organisms in the Avida Digital Evolution Platform, in which we investigated the impact of spatial resource heterogeneity on phenotypic diversity. Since an important benefit of diversity may be increased evolutionary potential, we also tracked the probability of a complex trait evolving in the context of various levels of spatial heterogeneity. We found that spatial entropy and phenotypic diversity have a strong positive correlation and this relationship is consistent across various spatial configurations. Diversity also increases evolutionary potential, but has a much smaller impact than other components of environmental composition. The most important of these components was the mean number of resources present in locations across the environment, likely owing to the importance of building blocks for the evolution of complex features. These results suggest that a general relationship exists between spatial heterogeneity and diversity, beyond the specific ecosystems and timescales in which it has previously been studied. By examining this relationship in the context of phenotypic evolution, we advance a mechanistic understanding of the resulting dynamics. Moreover, our results suggest that the likelihood of evolving various traits can be impacted by the spatial configuration of patches in which these traits are advantageous. These findings have implications for both evolutionary biology and evolutionary computation, as generating and maintaining diversity is critical to all forms of evolution.