Challenges Inherent in the Systematics and Taxonomy of Genera that have Recently Experienced Explosive Radiation: The Case of Orchids of the Genus Ophrys

Delimiting species in the taxonomically challenging orchid section Pseudophrys: Bayesian analyses of genetic and phenotypic data

“…This is, for example, the case of the Orchidaceae family, which comprises more than 30,000 named species [Plants of the World Online [POWO], 2022], including some of the most threatened species in the world (Fay, 2018), but in which species boundaries are sometimes blurred (Barrett and Freudenstein, 2011;Pessoa et al, 2012). Within this family, the Mediterranean genus Ophrys L. is of particular interest, due to its high level of ecological specialization and endemism rate, but it is also considered as a textbook example of taxonomic confusion (Bertrand et al, 2021;Cuypers et al, 2022), which may affect its conservation (Agapow et al, 2004;Pillon and Chase, 2007;Vereecken et al, 2010;Schatz et al, 2014). Some of this confusion arises from conflicting views on which operational criteria should be used to delimit species in this genus.…”

Holocene climate change promoted allopatric divergence and disjunct geographic distribution in a bee orchid species

“…However, in a recent study on the same set of individuals, we showed that O. aveyronensis from the Grands Causses and from the Iberian Peninsula show subtle differences in a number of morphological and colour traits that may be involved in pollination (Gibert et al, 2022;. These subtle differences may arise as a result of local adaptation to a "secondary" pollinator species (see Joffard et al, 2019;Schatz, Genoud, Claessens & Kleynen, 2020;Baguette et al, 2021). Ongoing work is now addressing whether this variation is indeed actually adaptive and involved in evolutionary divergence i) by assessing which phenotypic traits may be under divergent selection among the O. aveyronensis populations across their range and which ones may be evolving 'nonecologically' and ii) by investigating putative genomic regions associated with phenotypic trait values, genetic structure or ecological factors, something that remains largely underexplored in Ophrys so far (but see Gibert et al, 2024).…”

“…Recent studies elaborated from some empirical evidence that delineating the so-called ‘micro-species’ in Ophrys is practically cumbersome (Bateman et al, 2021; Bateman and Rudall, 2023), especially in the section Sphegodes to which the O. aveyronensis species complex belongs. Some genomic data such as whole plastomes that are useful to delineate the main Ophrys lineages , present sequence similarity degree of more than 99.5% between ‘microspecies’ and therefore do not present enough variation to allow to discriminate them (Bertrand et al, 2019; Bertrand et al, 2021b; Bateman et al, 2021). Here, however, our results demonstrate that an approach consisting of sampling populations ( i.e.…”

“…The degree of plant-pollinator specialization (Joffard, Massol, Grenié, Montgellard & Schatz, 2019) required to ensure the success of the Ophrys pollination strategy was shown to be the driver of the impressive rate of diversification of the genus within the Mediterranean basin, and to a lesser extent in other parts of Western Europe (see Baguette, Bertrand, Stevens & Schatz, 2020, for a recent review). If Ophrys are notorious for their relatively high number of likely cases of speciation with gene flow, the number of island endemic taxa suggests that geographic isolation (induced by insularity) is also a key factor to form the large number of recent and emerging Ophrys species observable nowadays (see Bertrand, Baguette, Joffard & Schatz et al, 2021).…”

Extracting Quantitative Information from Images Taken in the Wild: A Case Study of Two Vicariants of the Ophrys aveyronensis Species Complex

“…This analytical framework is therefore of great interest in fields such as integrative taxonomy or to identify potential traits for local adaptation and/or reproductive isolation in evolutionary ecology. It advantageously complements but does not replace other integrative taxonomy methods in such a way that it will not specifically tell the user what is the most likely number of groups (taxa) to best describe the data [58]. As long as the sampling design is balanced, random forest is a also flexible enough to incorporate any phenotypic data, as well as genotypic and or environmental data.…”