The concept of a "potential taxon" as a nameand literature-related data area in botanical databases is introduced. A potential taxon is a name with taxon circumscription information attached to it by means of one or more literature references. As a compromise solution between linking information in database systems entirely to specimen data or only to accepted names, using potential taxa can ef...

Increasingly, biologists are constructing evolutionary trees on large numbers of overlapping sets of taxa, and then combining them into a ‘supertree’ that classifies all the taxa. In this paper, we ask how much coverage of the total set of taxa is required by these subsets in order to ensure that we have enough information to reconstruct the supertree uniquely. We describe two results — a combi...

Ecologists and paleontologists often rely on higher taxon surrogates instead of complete inventories of biological diversity. Despite their intrinsic appeal, the performance of these surrogates has been markedly inconsistent across empirical studies, to the extent that there is no consensus on appropriate taxonomic resolution (i.e., whether genus- or family-level categories are more appropriate...

Linnaeus and other 18th Century naturalists practiced nomenclature in a way that associated taxon names more strongly with taxa (groups) than with the categorical ranks of the taxonomic (“Linnaean”) hierarchy. For those early naturalists, ranks functioned merely as devices for indicating hierarchical position that did not affect the application or spelling of taxon names. Consequently, taxa did...

The homoplasy excess test (HET) is a tree-based screen for hybrid taxa in multilocus nuclear phylogenies. Homoplasy between a hybrid taxon and the clades containing the parental taxa reduces bootstrap support in the tree. The HET is based on the expectation that excluding the hybrid taxon from the data set increases the bootstrap support for the parental clades, whereas excluding non-hybrid tax...