kcranston
commented
6 years ago Thanks for the detailed description. Couple of comments: all dotted branches in the tree are from taxonomy, and all solid branches are from phylogeny. So, except for the one solid branch Piophilidae -> Piophilinae -> Mycetaulus that is from Wiegmann 2011, this is all coming from synthesis of NCBI, GBIF, IRMNG, with priority given to NCBI. We don't provide services for editing the tree / taxonomy directly, so there are two ways to fix this:
- Work with one of out taxonomy sources (NCBI, GBIF, IRMNG) to improve their taxonomy, so that when we import a new version, we get the changes.
- Import a phylogeny that better represents the relationships (phylogeny always takes priority over taxonomy in our system). If you have access to a file containing the tree(s) from Rochefort, you can upload them at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/curator. You can import any tree that has a reference available, it doesn't need to be a peer-reviewed paper (thesis ok, although the link you provided to the Rochefort thesis gives a "Cannot process request: null" error).
Let us know if you have any questions about uploading trees. There is documentation here
jar398
Chris-Angell
It appears the phylogeny and taxonomy of this family has been merged sloppily from multiple sources using three different taxonomic schemes: the old "lumped" style placing many species in the genus Piophila with many subgenera; the scheme proposed by McAlpine (1977) with many genera, including the large genera Neopiophila Parapiophila, with Piophila itself containing only one or two species (mostly in use in North America); and the revision to McAlpine's scheme by Ozerov (2004), synonymizing several genera, notably Parapiophila with Allopiophila (mostly in use in Europe).
Because of this, some species have been included two or even three times under different genera (e.g. Allopiophila atrifrons = Parapiophila atrifrons = Piophila atrifrons). This makes the tree indecipherable. I don't really have a horse in this race, as far as which scheme you choose, but you cannot have all three.
The suprageneric classification is similarly confused. Presumably because Ozerov and McAlpine used similar names in slightly different ways, the clade corresponding to the former family Thyreophoridae (= Thyreophorina sensu McAlpine = Thyreophorini sensu Ozerov), containing Thyreophora, Centrophlebomyia, Dasyphlebomyia, Bocainmyia, Piophilosoma and Protothyreophora has been split up within and without Piophilinae. Furthermore, the small subfamily Neottiophilidae is missing its type genus Neottiophilum.
However, both of these classification schemes are rather old, and not phylogenetic (although McAlpine 1977 does contain an "intuitive" cladistic dendrogram, which you might consider here). A more recent phylogenetic analysis of the family was conducted a few years ago by Rochefort (2015) as a MSc thesis project. It confirms and challenges aspects of both earlier taxonomic schemes. I do not know what the OToL policy is on non peer reviewed work, but I have linked it below.
McAlpine, J.F. 1977. A revised classification of the Piophilidae, including ‘Neottiophilidae’ and ‘Thyreophoridae’ (Diptera: Schizophora). The Memoirs of the Entomological Society of Canada 103: 1-66.
Ozerov, A.L. 2004. On the classification of the family Piophilidae (Diptera). Entomological Review 84: 600 - 608.
Rochefort, S. 2015. Taxonomy and phylogeny of Piophilidae (Diptera). MSc Thesis. McGill University. http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/webclient/StreamGate?folder_id=0&dvs=1515530723005~382&usePid1=true&usePid2=true