Areas of endemism in the Nearctic: a case study of 1339 species of Miridae (Insecta: Hemiptera) and their plant hosts

Abstract

Areas of endemism are essential first hypotheses in investigating historical biogeography, but there is a surprising paucity of such hypotheses for the Nearctic region. Miridae, the plant bugs, are an excellent taxon to study in this context, because this group combines high species diversity, often small distribution ranges, a history of modern taxonomic revisions, and comprehensive electronic data capture and data cleaning that have resulted in an exceptionally error‐free geospatial data set. Many Miridae are phytophagous and feed on only one or a small number of host plant species. The programs ndm/vndm are here used on plant bug and plant data sets to address two main objectives: (i) identify areas of endemism for plant bugs based on parameters used in a recent study that focused on Nearctic mammals; and (ii) discuss hypotheses on areas of endemism based on plant bug distributions in the context of areas identified by their host plant species. Given the narrow distribution ranges of many species of Miridae, the analytical results allow for tests of the prediction that areas of endemism for Miridae are smaller and more numerous, especially in the Western Nearctic, than are those of their host plants. Analyses of the default plant bug data set resulted in 45 areas of endemism, 35 of them north of Mexico and many located in the Western Nearctic; areas in the Nearctic are more numerous and smaller than those identified by mammals. The host plant data set resulted in ten areas of endemism, and even though the size range of areas is similar between the Miridae and plant data sets, the average area size is smaller in the Miridae data set. These results allow for the conclusion that the Miridae indeed present a valuable model system to investigate areas of endemism in the Nearctic.

Patterns of Endemism in Turkey, the Meeting Point of Three Global Biodiversity Hotspots, Based on Three Diverse Families of Vascular Plants

“…These are among the most species-rich plant families in Turkey and constitute a significant proportion of the endemic flora of Turkey (c. 30%). In order to identify CEs, three biodiversity indices, i.e., Endemic Richness (ER), Rangerestricted Endemic Richness (RER), and Weighted Endemic Richness (WER; referred to as Endemism Richness by Kier et al, 2009), were applied (Crisp et al, 2001;Linder, 2001); in order to identify AEs, Endemicity Analysis (Szumik et al, 2002) was used, which has been successfully applied in different parts of the world (Martínez-Hernández et al, 2015;Mendoza-Fernández et al, 2015;Szumik and Goloboff, 2015;Elías and Aagesen, 2016;Hoffmeister and Ferrari, 2016;Zhang et al, 2016;Weirauch et al, 2017;Noroozi et al, 2018). We address the following questions: (1) Where are the CEs and AEs in Turkey?…”

Cost-efficient high throughput capture of museum arthropod specimen DNA using PCR-generated baits

“…Phylogenetic hypotheses for the entire group are in their infancy (Jung & Lee, 2011), but studies targeting selected subfamilies including the Phylinae now provide testable hypotheses (Konstantinov & Knyshov, 2015; Menard, Schuh, & Woolley, 2014; Namyatova, Konstantinov, & Cassis, 2015; Tatarnic & Cassis, 2012). The taxonomic diversity of plant bugs in the Western U.S. is fairly well understood (Cassis & Schuh, 2012; Weirauch et al, 2016), but few species have been incorporated into phylogenetic analyses, and some are only known from the type specimen(s). As the first test case, we selected a putatively monophyletic group of native oak-associated plant bugs, the so called “Orange Oak Bugs” (OOB) (Weirauch, 2006a, 2006b), where some species may be monophagous on specific species of oaks, while at least two widespread and polymorphic species ( Phallospinophylus setosus Weirauch and Pygovepres vaccinicola (Knight)) feed on a variety of host plants (including Fagaceae, Rhamnaceae, and Rosaceae).…”

GeX: an automated tool for generating XYD files for analysis of endemicity using VNDM

“…Ribeiro et al., ) to smaller areas (e.g. Escalante et al., ; Klassa and Santos, ; Weirauch et al., ), several studies have been successfully carried out using NDM, with results often being better than those obtained through other methods (Escalante, ; Amorim and Santos, ).…”