Conclusions
The identification of new plant species usually requires a broad
understanding of taxon boundaries applying multidisciplinary
methodologies. Our study exemplifies the complexity of identifying new
species by integrating different types of data: target capture
sequencing data from herbarium specimens to reveal phylogenomic patterns
and introgression between clades, differences in allelic ratios to
estimate ploidy, spatial analysis estimating current and past
distribution ranges and niche overlaps, and macro- and micromorphometric
comparisons. By integrating all these results, we have newly
corroborated the existence of four species in the Mediterranean Tamus
clade of Dioscorea , maintaining D. orientalis as a
distinct species, and demonstrating that D. edulis and D.
cretica are species discrete from the synonymy of the morphologically
variable D. communis .