A0187
Title: Choosing the number of biological species in the presence of spatial patterns of differentiation
Authors: Gabriele d Angella - University of Bologna (Italy) [presenting]
Christian Hennig - University of Bologna (Italy)
Abstract: The delimitation of biological species and the identification of their diverse subpopulations are key activities for the preservation of biodiversity. Statistical delimitation methods use empirical data to suggest how many species are represented in a dataset. This task is hard in that spatial patterns of differentiation can introduce genetic variation between populations belonging to the same species. Software packages that consider geographic information to estimate ancestry proportions from spatially explicit genotypic data can be used to delimit species in these setups. However, determining the number of species represented in a dataset remains a challenge, and practitioners are often left with heuristic methods that are not mathematically well-defined. Therefore, it can be beneficial to develop techniques that inform this choice. Options include methods that study the relationship between genetic and geographic dissimilarities between individuals, routines that contrast the delimitation software output with appropriate null models and approaches from selective inference. The effectiveness of these methodologies can be assessed on data generated with SLiM, a software package that can simulate spatially explicit genetic data.
