Abstract

The phylogeny of most of the species in the avian passerine family Locustellidae is inferred using a Bayesian species tree approach (Bayesian Estimation of Species Trees, BEST), as well as a traditional Bayesian gene tree method (MrBayes), based on a dataset comprising one mitochondrial and four nuclear loci. The trees inferred by the different methods agree fairly well in topology, although in a few cases there are marked differences. Some of these discrepancies might be due to convergence problems for BEST (despite up to 1 x 10(9) iterations). The phylogeny strongly disagrees with the current taxonomy at the generic level, and we propose a revised classification that recognizes four instead of seven genera. These results emphasize the well known but still often neglected problem of basing classifications on non-cladistic evaluations of morphological characters. An analysis of an extended mitochondrial dataset with multiple individuals from most species, including many subspecies, suggest that several taxa presently treated as subspecies or as monotypic species as well as a few taxa recognized as separate species are in need of further taxonomic work. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords

Species trees; Gene trees; Phylogeny; Concatenation; BEST; MrBayes; Classification

Published in

Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution
2011, Volume: 58, number: 3, pages: 513-526
Publisher: ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE

SLU Authors

• Alström, Per

  • SLU Swedish Species Information Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Associated SLU-program

Biodiversity


UKÄ Subject classification

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Evolutionary Biology
Genetics


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2010.12.012

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/58866