Barcoding success of African rain forest trees at a local scale for species identification (a) and genus identification (b).

Shared superscript letters indicate which pDNA regions or combinations of pDNA regions do not differ significantly in their barcoding success (% correct identification, χ2 tests).Two methods were used to evaluate barcoding identification success: the minimum genetic distance between sequence pairs (GD) and the maximal percentage identity in a basic local alignment search tool (PI). Correct identification = the individual is assigned to the correct species or genus only, multiple identification = the individual is assigned to several species or genera including the right one, wrong identification = the individual is assigned to one or several species or genera not including the right one. Only those individuals with at least one other individual of their species in the database were tested against databases containing all the available samples, except the query individual. N.: number, sp.: species, ge.: genera, ind.: individual. Note that six morpho-species belonging to unknown genera were excluded from the reference databases for genus-level identification but were kept for species-level identification.