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Recent studies indicate that the discriminatory power of the core DNA barcodes (rbcLa + matK) for land plants may have been overestimated since their performance have been tested only on few closely related species. In this study we focused mainly on how the addition of complementary barcodes (nrITS and trnH-psbA) to the core barcodes will affect the performance of the core barcodes in discriminating closely related species from family to section levels. In general, we found that the core barcodes performed poorly compared to the various combinations tested. Using multiple criteria, we finally advocated for the use of the core + trnH-psbA as potential DNA barcode for the family Combretaceae at least in southern Africa. Our results also indicate that the success of DNA barcoding in discriminating closely related species may be related to evolutionary and possibly the biogeographic histories of the taxonomic group tested.

Attempts to investigate the drivers of invasion success are generally limited to the biological and evolutionary traits distinguishing native from introduced species. Although alien species introduced to the same recipient environment differ in their invasion intensity – for example, some are “strong invaders”; others are “weak invaders” – the factors underlying the variation in invasion success within alien communities are little explored. In this study, we ask what drives the variation in invasion success of alien mammals in South Africa. First, we tested for taxonomic and phylogenetic signal in invasion intensity. Second, we reconstructed predictive models of the variation in invasion intensity among alien mammals using the generalized linear mixed-effects models. We found that the family Bovidae and the order Artiodactyla contained more “strong invaders” than expected by chance, and that such taxonomic signal did not translate into phylogenetic selectivity. In addition, our study indicates that latitude, gestation length, social group size, and human population density are only marginal determinant of the variation in invasion success. However, we found that evolutionary distinctiveness – a parameter characterising the uniqueness of each alien species – is the most important predictive variable. Our results indicate that the invasive behavior of alien mammals may have been “fingerprinted” in their evolutionary past, and that evolutionary history might capture beyond ecological, biological and life-history traits usually prioritized in predictive modeling of invasion success. These findings have applicability to the management of alien mammals in South Africa.