engleski

Integrative taxonomy by molecular species delimitation?

Taxonomy aspires precise species identification and delimitation to provide basic information on biological diversity. Traditionally, taxonomy relies on comparative morphological analyses to identify species and to derive new species hypotheses. However, taxonomic capacities decreased critically in the past decades, lea ding to the so-called taxonomic impediment. At the same time the importance of molecular taxonomy – the identification and delimitation of taxa based on molecular markers – has increased. In aquatic insects, molecular sequence data has been successfully used to corroborate new species hypotheses, perform life stage associations and support systematic research. Molecular data are also increasingly used to infer species hypotheses without taxonomic consequences. Numerous tools to identify and delineate new species in absence of explicit taxonomic hypotheses were developed, as were approaches to generate diversity richness hypotheses based on molecular datasets only. Here, we discuss the precision and accuracy of commonly available molecular species delimitation tools. We examine the potential of these integrative taxonomic approaches by comparing the results of molecular species delimitation against morphologically identifiable taxa in aquatic insects as benchmarks. In particular, we assessed the performance of Automatic Barcode Gap Detection (ABGD), Generalized Mixed Yule Coalescent (GMYC), Poisson Tree Process (PTP) and Species Tree And Classification Estimation, Yarely (STACEY) methods. Our results show that only multi-locus species delimitation provides taxonomically relevant information, and accurately delineates morphologically distinct entities. All other methods have a high potential of over- or underestimating species diversity.

integrative taxonomy, species delimitation, Drusinae

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