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The population biology of coevolution

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Researches on Population Ecology

Abstract

New populational approaches to the study of coevolution among species are confronting two major problems: the geographic scale at which coevolution proceeds, and the long-standing issue of how species may coevolve with more than one other species. By incorporating the ecological structure of life histories and populations into analyses of the coevolutionary process, these studies are indicating that coevolutionary change is much more ecologically dynamic than indicated by earlier work. Rather than simply a slow, stately process shaping species over long periods of time, parts of the coevolutionary process may proceed rapidly (sometimes observable in less than a decade), continually molding and remolding populations and communities locally and over broad geographic scales.

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  1. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 735 State Street, Suite 300, 93101-3351, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    John N. Thompson

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Correspondence to John N. Thompson.

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Thompson, J.N. The population biology of coevolution. Res Popul Ecol 40, 159–166 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02765236

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02765236

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