Abstract

Abstract Species delimitation (grouping individuals into distinct taxonomic groups) is an essential part of evolutionary, conservation, and molecular ecology. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) barcodes, short fragments of the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene, are being used in environmental bioassessments to assign specimens to putative species, but no method for delimiting DNA barcodes into species-level entities is universally accepted. We investigated the effect of delimitation methods on outcomes of bioassessments based on DNA barcodes. We used 2 tree-construction methods (neighbor joining [NJ], maximum likelihood [ML]) and 4 classes of species-delimitation criteria (distance-based, bootstrap support, reciprocal monophyly, and coalescent-based) with a DNA barcode data set consisting of 3 genera and 2202 COI sequences. We compared species delimitations for Baetis (Ephemeroptera:Baetidae), Eukiefferiella (Diptera:Chironomidae), and Simulium (Diptera:Simuliidae) from different streams. We assessed con...

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