Abstract
Diplolepis (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) are gall wasps that induce conspicuous galls on Rosa spp. (Rosaceae). These species are distributed globally and in Europe some are especially common and are founder organisms of biological communities composed of different insects. However, the ecological niches of these species have not been studied in detail. We modelled the potential distributions of these species using the locations of the galls of the four most abundant species of Diplolepis on the Iberian Peninsula (Diplolepis mayri, Diplolepis rosae, Diplolepis eglanteriae and Diplolepis nervosa, the galls of latter two are indistinguishable) using four different algorithms and identified the resulting consensus for the species. We compared the potential distributions of these species, considering their spatial complementarity and the distributions of their host plants. We found that D. mayri and D. eglanteriae/nervosa have complementary distributions on the Iberian Peninsula. The former species is found in the Mediterranean region, while D. eglanteriae and D. nervosa are distributed mainly in the Eurosiberian region. Diplolepis rosae has the widest distribution on the Iberian Peninsula. Our models constitute the first effort to identify suitable areas for species of Diplolepis species on the Iberian Peninsula and could be useful for understanding the evolutionary ecology of these species throughout their distribution in the western Palearctic.
Highlights
The Cynipidae family comprises approximately 1,500 species worldwide, mainly distributed in temperate areas in the Northern Hemisphere (Ronquist, 1999; Csoka et al, 2005; Melika, 2006)
We modelled the potential distributions of these species using the locations of the galls of the four most abundant species of Diplolepis on the Iberian Peninsula (Diplolepis mayri, Diplolepis rosae, Diplolepis eglanteriae and Diplolepis nervosa, the galls of latter two are indistinguishable) using four different algorithms and identified the resulting consensus for the species
The results from the random forest (RF), generalized linear models (GLMs) and generalized additive models (GAMs) algorithms were selected for the species D. eglanteriae/nervosa and D. rosae because they had a maximum suitability of more than 0.80
Summary
The Cynipidae family comprises approximately 1,500 species worldwide, mainly distributed in temperate areas in the Northern Hemisphere (Ronquist, 1999; Csoka et al, 2005; Melika, 2006). The Diplolepidini tribe is strictly associated with Rosaceae and includes two genera, Diplolepis Geoffroy, 1762 and Liebelia Kieffer, 1903, the species of which induce galls only on plants of the genus Rosa, but are not highly host-specific within this genus (Pujade-Villar, 1993). Among these genera, the most diverse and widespread is Diplolepis. Six species of Diplolepis are common and widely distributed in Europe, but only five species are recorded on the Iberian Peninsula (Nieves-Aldrey, 2001a) (Fig. 1): Diplolepis eglanteriae (Hartig, 1840), Diplolepis nervosa (Curtis, 1838), Diplolepis rosae (Linnaeus, 1758), Diplolepis mayri (Schlechtendal, 1877) and Diplolepis spinosissimae (Giraud, 1859). The second member of the Diplolepidini tribe, the predominantly Asian genus Liebelia, has only one species in Europe, Liebelia cavarai (Kieffer, 1895), which is restricted to the island of Sardinia (Vyrzhikovskaja, 1963)
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