Copyright c © Society of Systematic Biologists ISSN: 1063-5157 print / 1076-836X online DOI: 10.1080/10635150701748506 Species Delimitation: New Approaches for Discovering Diversity

Systematics can be considered to have two major goals: (1) to discover and describe species and (2) to determine the phylogenetic relationships of these species. But even a quick perusal of titles in Systematic Biology through-out most of its 15-year history will confirm an obvious fact: most articles focus on reconstructing phylogenies and on using these phylogenies to address evolution-ary or biogeographic questions, with few papers on the methodology underlying this first major goal of system-atics research (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, species delimitation, the process by which species boundaries are determined and new species are discovered, may finally be emerging as a ma-jor topic in modern systematics (e.g., Sites and Marshall, 2003). New methods for species delimitation are being developed (e.g., Puorto et al., 2001; Templeton, 2001; Wiens and Penkrot, 2002; Morando et al., 2003; Pons et al., 2006) and compared (e.g., Marshall et al., 2006; Pons et al., 2006). Ambitious proposals have been made, with the goal of accelerating the rate at which new species are discovered and described, including DNA barcoding (e.g., Hebert et al., 2003, 2004), DNA taxonomy (Tautz et al., 2003), and Web-based taxonomy (e.g., Godfray