Roadmap to High-Throughput Taxonomy of Marine Benthic Communities: Towards an Integrative Species Delimitation Approach for Large-Scale Biodiversity Assessment

Anthropogenic disturbances have generated selection pressures on ecology and evolution of species, affecting community dynamics, ecosystem functioning and global processes. As ecologists strive to understand increasingly complex processes, involving all species potentially interacting in natural communities, the development of reliable and accessible taxonomic approaches to accurately delineate species in broad datasets has become a fundamental need.

Recognition of biological species as independent evolutionary units constitutes a fundamental step in many fields of biodiversity. Recent changes to production of molecular sequences have raised interest in development of statistical tools for species delimitation. But current approaches rely on sequence similarity thresholds or on complex evolutionary models and are not suited to taxonomically large datasets. Researchers confronted with the task of delineating species are often unsure about which methods and criteria are appropriate.

We introduce a strategic high-throughput taxonomic approach for robust biodiversity assessment in marine communities. Based on gastropods and crabs collected from British Columbia, we define a simple method to generate fast and accurate species-hypotheses based on the phylogenetic species concept. Guidelines introducing strengths and limitations of operational taxonomic criteria as well as common pitfalls to be avoided will be discussed; helping ecologists delineate and identify species using broad biological evidence.