Data for: Morphological species delimitation in the Western Pond Turtle (Actinemys): Can machine learning methods aid in cryptic species identification?

As the discovery of cryptic species has increased in frequency, there has been interest in whether geometric morphometric data can detect fine-scale patterns of variation that can be used to morphologically diagnose such species. We used a combination of geometric morphometric data and an ensemble of five supervised machine learning methods to investigate whether plastron shape can differentiate two putative cryptic turtle species, Actinemys marmorata and Actinemys pallida. Actinemys has been the focus of considerable research due to its biogeographic distribution and conservation status. Despite this work, reliable morphological diagnoses for its two species are still lacking. We validated our approach on two datasets, one consisting of eight morphologically disparate emydid species, and the other consisting of two subspecies of Trachemys (T. scripta scripta, T. scripta elegans). The validation tests returned near-perfect classification rates, demonstrating that plastron shape is an ef..., , , # Data for: Morphological species delimitation in the Western Pond Turtle (*Actinemys*): Can machine learning methods aid in cryptic species identification?

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wm37pvmv1](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wm37pvmv1)

This dataset includes:

-2D landmark data for the turtle plastra used in the paper

-classification data for the different *Actinemys marmorata* subgroups tested

-R scripts and formatted data used in the analyses described in the paper

-photographic voucher images of specimens observed in the field and in a private collection that are included in the dataset but that are not accessioned in a natural history museum

## Description of the data and file structure

The top directory of the dataset includes three sub-directories (morphometric_data; R; turtle_images) and three standalone files (GIS_workflow.pdf; institutional_abbreviations.txt; marmorata_metadata_rounded_coordinates.csv).

* The **morphometric_data** directory includes the 2-dimension...