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Species Delimitation and Analysis of Cryptic Species Diversity in the XXI Century

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Abstract

The potentials and limitations of different approaches to revealing species boundaries and describing cryptic species are discussed. Both the traditional methods of species delimitation, mostly based on morphological analysis, and the approaches using molecular markers are considered. Besides, the prospects of species identification using digital image recognition and machine learning are briefly considered. It is concluded that molecular markers provide very important material for species delimitation; the value of these data increases manifold if they can be compared with information on morphology, geographic distribution, and ecological preferences of the studied taxa. In many cases, only a practicing taxonomist who knows his or her group thoroughly can correctly interpret the molecular data and incorporate them into the existing knowledge system in order to make a taxonomic decision.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to A.O. Vershinina (University of California, Santa Cruz, California, U.S.A.), M.S. Vishnevskaya and E.A. Pazhenkova (St. Petersburg State University), A.V. Dantchenko (Moscow State University), and N.A. Shapoval (Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences) for help with research and discussion of the manuscript.

Funding

This work was carried out within the framework of the State research project AAAA-A19-119020790106-0 (sections Species Delimitation in the Pre-Molecular Epoch and Species Delimitation in the Molecular Epoch) and financially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project 18-04-00263a: sections Delimitation Methods Based on Distances and Delimitation Methods Based on Phylogenetic Analysis of Molecular Characters; project 17-04-00828: sections Delimitation Methods Based on Models and Methods Based on Validation of Provisional Species Hypotheses; project 17-04-00754: section Taxonomic Intuition and the Potentials of Artificial Intelligence) and the Russian Science Foundation (project 19-14-00202: sections The Species Concepts and Analysis of Cryptic Species Diversity).

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  1. Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia

    V. A. Lukhtanov

  2. St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia

    V. A. Lukhtanov

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Russian Text © The Author(s), 2019, published in Entomologicheskoe Obozrenie, 2019, Vol. 98, No. 2, pp. 358–370.

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Lukhtanov, V.A. Species Delimitation and Analysis of Cryptic Species Diversity in the XXI Century. Entmol. Rev. 99, 463–472 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0013873819040055

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