The Relationship between Genus/Species Richness and Morphological Diversity among Subfamilies of Jewel Beetles

摘要

Morphological diversity and species richness provide insights into biodiversity and have been studied extensively in recent years. Most researchers have found a positive correlation between these factors in many groups at the local community scale; however, this documented relationship has not always been consistent because of diverse niches and the status of an organism in a given ecosystem. Here we propose a new paradigm for the analysis of higher taxa biodiversity based on a cosmopolitan dataset to further investigate this contradiction. The morphological diversity of 1106 buprestid species from around the world was quantified based on the contours of the pronotum and elytron in dorsal view using a geometric morphometric approach. We found a positive correlation between morphological diversity and genus richness while no significance was found in the species-level test. Furthermore, the correlation between morphological diversity and genus richness is higher than it is in the species-level test. Our results demonstrate the superiority of higher taxa in biodiversity, and that the geometric morphometric approach could quite accurately reveal diversity patterns of the family Buprestidae. These conclusions complement the crucial aspect in several disciplines, including biodiversity, phylogeny and evolutionary strategy.