Motivation

Species delimitation (SD) is on the verge of becoming a fully fledged research field in systematics, but the variety of available approaches tends to result in significant—sometimes striking—incongruences, when tested comparatively with a given taxonomic sampling.

Results

We present LIMES, an automatic calculation tool which qualitatively compares species partitions obtained by distinct SD approaches, regardless of their respective theoretical backgrounds, and even in absence of reference topology. The program implements four different previously published indexes, and allows their automated calculation.

Availability and implementation

LIMES is freely downloadable at www.limes.cnrs.fr.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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