During this time he published some two hundred scientific articles (and several books) on aspects of butterfly taxonomy, evolution and ecology (especially regarding tropical rainforest and high mountain habitats).
Many of these publications appeared in Reports of the Museum of Natural History University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, a series that Johnson edited personally, without peer review.
[3][4][5][6][7] Johnson's publications, and hundreds of species and generic names created by him and a number of co-authors during that period, involved mostly "hairstreak" and "blue" butterflies.
A number of these names are no longer valid, including several that were based on specimens composed of pieces of different species that had been glued together to form chimeric composites.
[8][9] Polyommatines ("blues") are the same lineage studied by Vladimir Nabokov during his scientific career (first at the American Museum of Natural History and later at Harvard University) before his fame as a novelist.
In addition to taxonomic work, Johnson, Balint and Benyamini published on the evolutionary and biogeographic origins of the high mountain butterflies of South America, an ongoing biogeographic mystery originally explored by Nabokov[11] This work, and Johnson's many popular articles on science in world periodicals (including Natural History and The New York Times Science Times) also involved him in significant conservation work, as an advisor, especially in association with The Nature Conservancy (regarding American plains-prairie habitats), The World Wildlife Fund (regarding the monarch butterfly overwintering grounds in Mexico) and several endangered species, one of which (the Karner Blue) had been described by Nabokov.