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Updated: Sep 26, 2025

A Concoction Pipeline for Generating Molecular Operational Taxonomic Units (MOTUs) Among Riparian and Aquatic Beetles
Published on: July 11, 2025
Heuristics, species, and the analysis of systematic data
Tom Wells1, Tom Carruthers2, Robert W Scotland1
1Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
None:
Disagreements over how to define species potentially render them incomparable, yet biologists routinely count and compare species. This 'species problem' persists despite the wealth of data and methods available to contemporary systematists. A heuristic approach to species provides a consistent yet flexible means of selecting, assessing, and integrating different biological data.
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