Data from: Crayfish molecular systematics: using a combination of procedures to estimate phylogeny

The use of comparative methods to test evolutionary hypotheses has become more common at both the macro- and microevolutionary levels. The application of such techniques is especially troublesome at the interface of these levels because phylogenetic relationships are often difficult to estimate. The use of a technique developed to estimate intraspecific cladograms combined with more traditional methods of phylogenetic estimation can improve the estimate in data sets containing a range of diversity when the lower bound of the range approaches 0% divergence. For nucleotide sequence data from the 16S region of the mitochondrial DNA from 72 individuals representing 37 species, this combined-procedures approach improved the estimate of phylogenetic relationships using maximum-parsimony, maximum-likelihood, and neighbor-joining methods. The estimated trees were used to examine systematic hypotheses relating to the crayfish genus Orconectes and species relationships within the subgenus Procericambarus. The monophyly of Procericambarus is not supported by the mitochondrial data, and the hypotheses of unique origins of various morphological features previously used in determining crayfish relationships is unsupported.