Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Earth & Marine Sciences A308
Phone: 831.459.5358
Fax: 831.459.5353
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JOHN N. THOMPSON Professor of EEBiology B.A., Washington & Jefferson College, Pennsylvania Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana THOMPSON LAB

Earth & Marine Sciences A308 University of California Santa Cruz, CA 95064 phone 831.459.4741 fax 831.459.5353 thompson@biology.ucsc.edu office hours

Coevolution and the Organization of Biodiversity

Research in my laboratory is on the ways in which coevolution among species organizes the earth's biodiversity. The goal is to understand how the web of life is organized across broad geographic landscapes as species coevolve with each other within and across biological communities. Our work includes studies of species interactions in many types of environments, from relatively pristine landscapes to others that are becoming increasingly fragmented and modified by introduced taxa. We use a wide range of ecological, genetic, molecular, and evolutionary approaches to study how the interacting species may coevolve in different ways in different habitats, and how interactions continue to evolve amid environmental change.

Current Research

We are currently evaluating the geographic structure and evolutionary dynamics of a variety of species interactions distributed throughout western North America, including those between plants and their pollinators and herbivores. We are asking how interacting species differ in local adaptation, how local coevolutionary hotspots shape the overall genetic structure and evolutionary trajectories of interactions, and how the evolution of polyploidy in plant populations leads to the diversification of plant species and interactions with other taxa.

Selected Publications

Thompson, J. N. 2009. The coevolving web of life (Presidential address). American Naturalist 173:125-140.

Thompson, J. N., and K. F. Merg. 2008. Evolution of polyploidy and diversification of plant-pollinator interactions. Ecology 89:2197-2206.

Rich, K. H., J. N. Thompson, and C. C. Fernandez. 2008. Diverse historical processes shape deep phylogeographic divergence in the pollinating seed parasite Greya politella. Molecular Ecology 17:2430-2448.

Forde, S. E., J. N. Thompson, R. D. Holt, and B. J. M. Bohannan. 2008. Coevolution drives temporal changes in fitness and diversity across environments in a bacteria-bacteriophage interaction. Evolution 62:1830-1839.

Guimarães P. R. Jr., V. Rico-Gray , P. S. Oliveira , T. J. Izzo, S. F. dos Reis, and J. N. Thompson. 2007. Interaction intimacy affects structure and coevolutionary dynamics in mutualistic networks. Current Biology 17:1797-1803.

Hoeksema, J., and J. N. Thompson 2007. Geographic structure in a widespread plant-mycorrhizal interaction: Pines and false truffles. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 20:1148-1163.

Thompson, J. N. 2006. Mutualistic webs of species. Science 312:372-373..

Thompson, J. N., and Fernandez, C. 2006. Temporal dynamics of antagonism and mutualism in a coevolving plant-insect interaction. Ecology 87:103-112.

Thompson, J. N. 2005. The geographic mosaic of coevolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Thompson, J.N., Nuismer, S.L. and Merg, K. 2004. Plant polyploidy and the evolutionary ecology and plant/animal interactions. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 82:511-519.

Calsbeek, R., Thompson, J.N. and Richardson, J.R. 2003. Patterns of molecular diversification in a biodiversity hotspot: the California Floristic Province. Molecular Ecology 12:1021-1029.

Thompson, J.N. and Cunningham, B.M. 2002. Geographic structure and dynamics of coevolutionary selection. Nature 417:735-738.