widespread species

[Neil Snow]

21 January, 1998

Systematics colleagues:

The taxonomic treatment of widespread species often gets to the "guts"
of systematics, and can induce diligent (re-)assessment of the
theoretical guideposts that help steer us in our decision making.

I am currently interested in learning more about morphological and
molecular variation in widespread species.  For the sake of this
posting, I will define a "widespread" species as one whose distribution
covers much of one or more continents, excluding those that are
obviously introduced and/or weedy.

In particular, I am interested in hearing from individuals who have
actively worked on the systematics of widespread species, irrespective
of their subdiscipline (entomology, ichthyology, mammology, botany,
etc.).  This information is being requested for my own edification, not
for any planned critiques of methodology and/or schools of thought.

It would be helpful to know the following:

1. The extent of morphological and/or molecular polymorphisms in the
widespread species.  This might include which characters express the
variation, and whether polymorphisms are fixed at the population level.

2. The manner in which you treated widespread species taxonomically. For
example, did you lump or split?  If you recognized infraspecific taxa,
did a particular theoretical basis guide you in their delineation?

3. Which species concept did you follow (e.g., mate recognition concept,
biological species concept, phylogenetic species concept; etc.)

4. Reference(s) of yours I might consult regarding your work.

NOTE: I am NOT interested (for now) in research that simply documents
DNA sequence variation in the absence of revisionary work.  Thus, a
study that coupled (for example) data from cpDNA or mtDNA with
morphological variation in the context of a revision would be of
interest; a study that merely documented molecular variation at some
marker in the absence of morphological and/or revisionary work would not
be of interest (again, for now).

I would greatly appreciate any reprints in this regard.

PLEASE REPLY DIRECTLY TO ME, NOT THE LIST.

Thanks for your assistance.

Neil
--
+----------------------------------------+
Dr. Neil Snow
Senior Botanist
Queensland Herbarium - Conservation Strategy Branch
80 Meiers Road, Indooroopilly, Queensland, Australia 4068
Tel: (07) 3896 9319  Fax: (07) 3896 9624
E-mail: Neil.Snow at env.qld.gov.au