Multidisciplinary approach to species delimitation: impact on conservation and biogeography

The taxonomic category “species” is a central unit for systematics, and it is used in all biological sciences. However, despite of its theoretical importance and long history of debates on its definition, the application of names for new or old taxa often is still lacking scientific rigor.

First of all, the systematics community should reflect if taxonomy is a matter of opinion or if it an objective discipline. In this talk I will bring some reflections on this topic using Epidendrum as an example. I will argue that taxonomy can and should be practiced testing hypothesis using current available tools. The focus will be on species complexes and species delimitation, showing how recognizing different numbers of species impacts estimates on conservation and biogeography. Distinct tools combined can be used to search for congruence of results in favor or against the acceptance of certain species names, aiming to satisfy as many as possible species concepts.

Moreover, multidisciplinary studies are also able to found evidence that some species are paleohybrids. Nowadays many taxonomists are mainly interested on the discovery of undescribed species, devoting much less effort to providing taxonomic revisions and multidisciplinary studies to test previous species hypotheses. These aspects should be taken into consideration, since for some regions of the Neotropics, a good portion of the purported orchid species are known only from their type specimen that have never been subject of subsequent critical analysis, inflating estimates of diversity.