Species Delimitation: A Decade After the Renaissance

By Arley Camargo, J. W. Sites. 2013

108 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A decade ago Sites and Marshall [1] described the empirical practice of species delimitation as “a Renaissance issue in systematic biology”. At the time there was an odd disconnect be‐ tween the two frequently stated empirical goals systematic biology: the discovery of: (1) monophyletic groups (clades) and relationships within these at all hierarchical levels above species; and (2) lineages (species); compared to the actual practice of the discipline. While much of systematic biology had been devoted to the first goal, the second goal had until re‐ cently been largely ignored [2], despite the fact that species are routinely used as the basic units of analysis in biogeography, ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation biology [3,4]. However, Sites and Marshall [1] noted “signs of a Renaissance” at the time of their re‐ view, which was precipitated in part by others emphasizing the need to distinguish between a non-operational, ontological definition of species, versus the empirical (operational) data needed to test their reality [5-7]. De Queiroz [7] (p. 60) noted that “All modern species defi‐ nitions either explicitly or implicitly equate species with segments of population level evolu‐ tionary lineages.” De Queiroz also noted that this was a revised version of Simpson’s “evolutionary species concept”, which defines a species as “a lineage (an ancestraldescend‐ ent sequence of populations) evolving separately from others and with its own evolutionary role and tendencies” ([8], p. 153), and called this a General Lineage Concept (GLC) of species ([7], p. 65). De Queiroz [9] further emphasized that the multiple empirical criteria simply re‐ flect the many contingent properties (differences in genetic or morphological features, adap‐ tive zones or ecological niches, mate-recognition systems, reproductive compatibility, monophyly, etc.) of diverging populations associated with different evolutionary processes operating in various geographic contexts [10,11]. Sites and Marshall [1] noted that the emerging consensus among systematists and evolutionary biologists was based on the utili‐ ty of this distinction (ontological definition vs. empirical species delimitation [SDL] meth‐

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Genetics, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb8dbe0098b1e903c144115d478ab2bbb914e5d1

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Citations in the corpus

ASAP: assemble species by automatic partitioning (2020, methodology): “In this category, the most popular methods are SpedeSTEM (Ence & Carstens, 2011), BPP (Yang & Rannala, 2014) and BFD (Leaché et al., 2014), reviewed (with other methods) in several articles (Camargo & Sites, 2013; Carstens et al., 2013; Fujita et al., 2012; Leavitt et al., 2015; Rannala, 2015).”
DNA-based species delimitation in algae (2014, methodology): “…in algae The idea that species are separately evolving metapopulation lineages, along with theoretical progress in phylogenetic and population genetic analyses, has led to the development of new methods of species delimitation (Sites & Marshall, 2003; Camargo & Sites, 2013; Carstens et al., 2013).”