Specific Hypotheses on the Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution

Abstract

Coevolution is one of the major processes organizing the earth's biodiversity. The need to understand coevolution as an ongoing process has grown as ecological concerns have risen over the dynamics of rapidly changing biological communities, the conservation of genetic diversity, and the population biology of diseases. The biggest current challenge is to understand how coevolution operates across broad geographic landscapes, linking local ecological processes with phylogeographic patterns. The geographic mosaic theory of coevolution provides a framework for asking how coevolution continually reshapes interactions across different spatial and temporal scales. It produces specific hypotheses on how geographically structured coevolution differs from coevolution at the local scale. It also provides a framework for understanding how local maladaptation can result from coevolution and why coevolved interactions may rarely produce long lists of coevolved traits that become fixed within species. Long‐term field studies of the same interaction across multiple communities and spatially structured mathematical models are together beginning to show that coevolution may be a more important ongoing process than had been indicated by earlier empirical and theoretical studies lacking a geographic perspective.