Research

Marc Johnson’s EvoEco Lab bridges the diverse questions and techniques from community ecology, genetics, chemistry and evolution. Although our lab addresses broad questions at the nexus of these fields, all of our research focuses on plants and plant-animal interactions. Presently, we have projects on four main topics:

Focus 1 – Urban evolutionary ecology

Focus 2 – The mechanisms and evolution of plant defenses against herbivores.

Focus 3 – The evolutionary consequences of asexual reproduction in plants.

Focus 4 – The effects of evolution in plants on the community ecology of arthropods and soil ecosystems.

Focus 5 – How herbivory and plant defence vary across climatic gradients.