Multivariate species boundaries and conservation of harlequin poison frogs

In this paper we present an iterative method for delimiting species under the general lineage concept (GLC) based on the multivariate clustering of morphological, ecological, and genetic data. Our rationale is that distinct multivariate groups correspond to evolutionarily independent metapopulation lineages because they reflect the common signal of different secondary defining properties (environmental and genetic distinctiveness, phenotypic diagnosability, etc.) that imply the existence of barriers preventing or limiting gene exchange. We applied this method to study a group of endangered poison frogs, the Oophaga histrionica complex. In our study case, we used next generation targeted amplicon sequencing to obtain a robust genetic dataset that we combined with patterns of morphological and ecological divergence. Our analyses revealed the existence of at least five different species in the histrionica complex (three of them new to science), some of them, occurring in small isolated pop...