Kurzfassung

A favourable combination of a small effect of phylogeny and a considerable range of environmental conditions make geographic variations in widespread species promising models for testing adaptive hypotheses. During the present project I will document macrogeographic and regional patterns of variation in body size, sexual size dimorphism, and female reproductive output in two widely distributed and broadly sympatric lizard species, Lacerta agilis and Zootoca vivipara. Under careful...
A favourable combination of a small effect of phylogeny and a considerable range of environmental conditions make geographic variations in widespread species promising models for testing adaptive hypotheses. During the present project I will document macrogeographic and regional patterns of variation in body size, sexual size dimorphism, and female reproductive output in two widely distributed and broadly sympatric lizard species, Lacerta agilis and Zootoca vivipara. Under careful consideration of potential confounding factors I will check for correlations of these patterns to each other, to environment (climate), and to phylogeny. In particular, several predictions of the fecundity-advantage hypothesis will be tested, and two prominent and currently debated patterns of body size variation, Bergmann’s rule and Rensch’s rule, will be addressed.
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