J. Wolfgang Wägele

J. Wolfgang Wägele
Research Museum Alexander Koenig | ZFMK · Arthropoda Department

PhD

About

323
Publications
96,658
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
7,843
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 1998 - January 2004
Ruhr University Bochum
Position
  • Head of Department for Systematic Zoology
January 1981 - February 1991
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
Position
  • Research Assistant
February 2004 - present
University of Bonn
Position
  • Chair for Systematic Zoology

Publications

Publications (323)
Article
Full-text available
Understanding insect behaviour and its underlying drivers is vital for interpreting changes in local biodiversity and predicting future trends. Conventional insect traps are typically limited to assess the composition of local insect communities over longer time periods and provide only limited insights into the effects of abiotic factors, such as...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, DNA metabarcoding has been used for a more efficient assessment of bulk samples. However, there remains a paucity of studies examining potential disparities in species identification methodologies. Here, we explore the outcomes of diverse clustering and filtering techniques on data from a non‐destructive metabarcoding approach, com...
Article
Full-text available
The occurrence and distribution of insects and their possible associations with plant species are largely unknown in Germany and baseline data to monitor future trends are urgently needed. Using newly-designed automated Malaise trap multi-samplers, the occurrence of insect species and their potential associations with plants was monitored synchrono...
Article
Full-text available
Caraway (Carum carvi L.) is a crop species with a gaining importance in Europe, especially as a condiment and medicinal plant. Here, we present the plant-pollinator network of caraway in a central European agricultural landscape, focusing on two diverse potential pollinator taxa, Diptera: Brachycera (= true flies) and Hymenoptera (sawflies, bees, w...
Article
Integration of the world's natural history collections can provide a resource for decision-makers.
Article
Full-text available
Over the past three centuries, people have collected objects and specimens and placed them in natural history museums throughout the world. Taken as a whole, this global collection is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it, an unparalleled source of information that is directly relevant to issues as divers...
Article
Full-text available
The woodlouse species Tylos maindroni Giordani Soika, 1954 (Crustacea, Isopoda, Oniscidea) is redescribed from the Persian Gulf based on light and scanning electron microscopy. This species differs from the closely related T. exiguus Stebbing, 1910, from the Red Sea (coasts of Sudan and Eritrea), and Socotra Island, by pereopod 1 superior margin wi...
Article
Full-text available
Rapid changes of the biosphere observed in recent years are caused by both small and large scale drivers, like shifts in temperature, transformations in land-use, or changes in the energy budget of systems. While the latter processes are easily quantifiable, documentation of the loss of biodiversity and community structure is more difficult. Change...
Article
Full-text available
This is a first inventory of Isopoda Anthuroidea from near-shore marine sites in Sulawesi. The material was collected from reefs, sea-grass beds and mangroves of the Minahasa Peninsula in North Sulawesi. Specimens were washed out from benthos samples collected in shallow water. The new species Hyssura reptans sp. nov., Kupellonura indonesica sp. no...
Article
The platy limestone (plattenkalk) deposit of Vallecillo in northeastern Mexico is widely known for its well preserved and diverse fish and marine reptilian assemblage dated to the early-middle Turonian (Late Cretaceous). A single specimen of the pachyrhizodont G. roberti revealed the first Cretaceous isopod (Crustacea, Arthropoda) attached to a fis...
Article
Reversing the decline of biodiver-sity in European agricultural land-scapes is urgent. We suggest eightmeasures addressing politics, eco-nomics, and civil society to instigatetransformative changes in agricul-tural landscapes. We emphasizethe need for a well-informed societyand political measures promotingsustainable farming by combiningfood produc...
Article
Full-text available
Despite conservation commitments, most countries still lack large-scale biodiversity monitoring programs to track progress toward agreed targets. Monitoring program design is frequently approached from a top-down, data-centric perspective that ignores the socio-cultural context of data collection. A rich landscape of people and organizations, with...
Article
Full-text available
Insekten sind weltweit die artenreichste Tiergruppe und für die Funktion von Ökosystemen unerlässlich. Der dramatische Rückgang der Insekten hat in Mitteleuropa inzwischen alarmierende Ausmaße erreicht. Er ist Anzeichen einer globalen Biodiversitätskrise, die sich bereits seit Jahrzehnten abgezeichnet hat und die unabsehbare ökonomische und ökologi...
Article
Full-text available
The community of taxonomy and special species experts is facing extinction in Germany if some long overdue countermeasures are not implemented in a timely manner. The authors of this paper represent a variety of key players who share the responsibility of developing and providing opportunities to raise a new generation of such experts. Together, th...
Article
Full-text available
This study summarizes results of a DNA barcoding campaign on German Diptera, involving analysis of 45,040 specimens. The resultant DNA barcode library includes records for 2,453 named species comprising a total of 5,200 BINs, including 2,700 CO1 haplotype clusters without species level assignment, so called “dark taxa”. Overall, 88 out of 117 famil...
Article
A phylogeny of the genus Phlesirtes Bolivar is presented, based on new sequence data of three genes (16S rDNA, COI, H3). Species of the genus Phlesirtes (subtribe Karniellina of the Tribe Conocephalini) occupy habitats of montane to afroalpine grasslands in East Africa. Phlesirtes is the most species-rich genus of the subtribe Karniellina, a group...
Article
A phylogeny of the genus Phlesirtes Bolivar is presented, based on new sequence data of three genes (16S rDNA, COI, H3). Species of the genus Phlesirtes (subtribe Karniellina of the Tribe Conocephalini) occupy habitats of montane to afroalpine grasslands in East Africa. Phlesirtes is the most species-rich genus of the subtribe Karniellina, a group...
Chapter
Full-text available
Natural history museums (NHMs) have a long history of collaboration with the amateur-expert naturalist community. A tradition of two-way knowledge sharing that continues today. Over time, NHMs have renewed their functions within society and assumed a relevance not only for the conservation of collections, but also for engaging society in the genera...
Article
Full-text available
On 28 April 2018 the European Parliament voted for a complete and permanent ban on all outdoor uses of the three most commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides. With the partial exception of the state of Ontario, Canada, governments elsewhere have failed to take action. Below is a letter, signed by 232 scientists from around the world, urgently callin...
Article
Full-text available
Elevational diversity gradients are typically studied without considering the complex small-scale topography of large mountains, which generates habitats of strongly different environmental conditions within the same elevational zones. Here we analyzed the importance of small-scale topography for elevational diversity patterns of hyperdiverse tropi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Insect pollination is one of the most important ecosystem services provided to humans. Over 75% of crops and 87,5% of wild plants are directly dependend from this type of pollination. The two biggest insect pollination groups in German agroecosystems are the Brachycera ("true flies") and Hymenoptera. However, a decline trend in agricultural biodive...
Article
Full-text available
Systematic biases such as long branch attraction can mislead commonly relied upon model-based (i.e. maximum likelihood and Bayesian) phylogenetic methods when, as is usually the case with empirical data, there is model misspecification. We present PhyQuart, a new method for evaluating the three possible binary trees for any quartet of taxa. PhyQuar...
Data
Complete results of 4-taxon simulations of 250 kbp long sequences given a single elongated branch. Complete results of 4-taxon simulations based on stepwise BL2 elongations of one terminal branch given 250 kbp long nucleotide alignment data. The pdf document can be opened with pdf readers like AdobeAcrobatReader, Xpdf, or DocumentViewer. (PDF)
Data
Complete results of 4-taxon simulations of 250 kbp long sequences given three elongated branches. Complete results of 4-taxon simulations based on stepwise BL2 elongations of three terminal branches given 250 kbp long nucleotide alignment data. The pdf document can be opened with pdf readers like AdobeAcrobatReader, Xpdf, or DocumentViewer. (PDF)
Data
Complete results of 4-taxon simulations of 250 kbp long sequences given two elongated branches with and without using correction factor. Complete PhyQuart results of 4-taxon simulations with and without using correction factor ω based on stepwise BL2 elongations of two adjacent or non-adjacent terminal branches given 250 kbp long nucleotide alignme...
Data
Complete results of 4-taxon simulations of sequences shorter < 250 kbp given two elongated branches. Complete results of 4-taxon simulations based on stepwise BL2 elongations of two adjacent or non-adjacent terminal branches given nucleotide alignment data < 250 kbp. The pdf document can be opened with pdf readers like AdobeAcrobatReader, Xpdf, or...
Data
Complete results of 4-taxon simulations of 250 kbp long sequences given two elongated branches. Complete results of 4-taxon simulations based on stepwise BL2 elongations of two adjacent or non-adjacent terminal branches given 250 kbp long nucleotide alignment data. The pdf document can be opened with pdf readers like AdobeAcrobatReader, Xpdf, or Do...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, large‐scale DNA barcoding campaigns have generated an enormous amount of COI barcodes, which are usually stored in NCBI 's GenBank and the official Barcode of Life database ( BOLD ). BOLD data are generally associated with more detailed and better curated meta‐data, because a great proportion is based on expert‐verified and voucher...
Article
Full-text available
Background Biodiversity patterns are inherently complex and difficult to comprehensively assess. Yet, deciphering shifts in species composition through time and space are crucial for efficient and successful management of ecosystem services, as well as for predicting change. To better understand species diversity patterns, Germany participated in...
Data
Result of the BIN discordance analysis (BOLD, September 25th 2015) for all BINs.
Data
Compilation of all specimens not identified to species level with embedded links leading to the respective BIN or specimen page on BOLD for an easy entry point to start refinements of taxonomic placements.
Article
Full-text available
The protection, preservation and restoration of aquatic ecosystems and their functions are of global importance. For European states it became legally binding mainly through the EU-Water Framework Directive (WFD). In order to assess the ecological status of a given water body, aquatic biodiversity data are obtained and compared to a reference water...
Article
Target DNA enrichment combined with high-throughput sequencing technologies is a powerful approach to probing a large number of loci in genomes of interest. However, software algorithms that explicitly consider nucleotide sequence information of target loci in multiple reference species for optimizing design of target enrichment baits to be applica...
Article
Biodiversity loss is mainly driven by human activity. While concern grows over the fate of hot spots of biodiversity, contemporary species losses still prevail in industrialized nations. Therefore, strategies were formulated to halt or reverse the loss, driven by evidence for its value for ecosystem services. Maintenance of the latter through conse...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Tropical mountain forests are hotspots of biodiversity hosting a huge but little known diversity of insects that is endangered by habitat destruction and climate change. Therefore, rapid assessment approaches of insect diversity are urgently needed to complement slower traditional taxonomic approaches. We empirically compare different...
Data
Calibration of distance clusters with morphospecies to determine best threshold. (EPS)
Data
ML-Tree providing an overwiew about morphospecies and MOTUs and differences between the methods. Column 1: Split morphospecies are connected by brackets and share the same colour. Columns 2–7 + 8: MOTUs (Networks, 3%-, 5%-, 7.5%-, GMYC-, PTP-clusters) and haplotypes splitting a morphospecies are indicated by dark blue fields, those lumping morphosp...
Data
Specimen list with sampling information. Podocarpus NP = Podocarpus National Park, RBSF = Reserva Biológica San Francisco. (PDF)
Data
Results of species delimitation for each specimen. (PDF)
Article
Full-text available
In the following paper, we present and discuss challenging applications for fine-grained visual classification (FGVC): biodiversity and species analysis. We not only give details about two challenging new datasets suitable for computer vision research with up to 675 highly similar classes, but also present first results with localized features usin...
Article
Full-text available
Analysis of sequence data using time-reversible substitution models and maximum likelihood (ML) algorithms is currently the most popular method to infer phylogenies, despite the fact that results often contradict each other. Searching for sources of error we focus on a hitherto neglected feature of these methods: character polarity is usually thoug...
Article
Mechanisms of speciation of flightless grasshoppers in mountainous and coastal East Africa are inferred considering (i) phylogenies estimated with a combination of molecular markers (16S rRNA locus, COI and H3), (ii) ecological data and (iii) the geographic distribution of Parepistaurus species. The study suggests that coastal taxa of Parepistaurus...
Article
Full-text available
Background Masking of multiple sequence alignment blocks has become a powerful method to enhance the tree-likeness of the underlying data. However, existing masking approaches are insensitive to heterogeneous sequence divergence which can mislead tree reconstructions. We present AliGROOVE, a new method based on a sliding window and a Monte Carlo re...
Article
Full-text available
Worldwide, we are experiencing an unprecedented, accelerated loss of biodiversity triggered by a bundle of anthropogenic threats such as habitat destruction, environmental pollution and climate change. Despite all efforts of the European biodiversity conservation policy, initiated 20 years ago by the Habitats Directive that provided the legal basis...
Book
Full-text available
The growing success of molecular methods has challenged traditional views of animal evolution and a large number of alternative hypotheses are hotly debated today. For the deep metazoan phylogeny project, data sets of hitherto unmatched quality and quantity were compiled and analysed with innovative bioinformatics tools. The book begins at the base...
Article
Full-text available
Two new species of Ligia are described, L. persica sp. nov. from the Persian Gulf and L. yemenica sp. nov. from the Gulf of Aden. Ligia persica occurs along the northern coasts of the Persian Gulf and around some Iranian islands such as Qeshm and Kish. A comparison of SEM micrographs shows that the shape and ornamentation of distal parts of the app...
Chapter
Full-text available
This review summarizes some major events in the evolution of body plans along the backbone of the arthropod tree, with a special focus on the origin of insects. The incompatibility among recent molecular phylogenies motivates a discussion about possible causes for failures: there is a worrisome lack of information in alignments, which can be visual...
Chapter
Full-text available
Recent improvements of tools for inference of phylogenies from molecular data could not impede that tree topologies estimated from different data sets are often mutually incompatible (see e.g. recent discussions about placement of Porifera in the metazoan tree). There are obviously causes of error that remain undetected. Fundamental discrepancies b...
Chapter
Full-text available
The theoretical reliability of Maximum Likelihood methods often fails in practice due to the finite size of data sets and because of peculiarities of the software, even when correct substitution models are used. In addition, systematic errors inherent to the method may occur. To detect biases, we simulated star phylogenies. In the case of star-lik...
Chapter
Phylogenetic analyses based on large molecular data sets are reviewed, including results of the ‘Deep Metazoan Phylogeny’ project. The phylogeny of Crustacea is still little understood and tree topologies based on molecular data are not congruent with many other morphological data especially for deeper nodes. Earlier analyses using DNA data were no...
Chapter
Full-text available
This review summarizes some major events in the evolution of body plans along the backbone of the arthropod tree, with a special focus on the origin of insects. The incompatibility among recent molecular phylogenies motivates a discussion about possible causes for failures: there is a worrisome lack of information in alignments, which can be visual...
Chapter
The theoretical reliability of Maximum Likelihood methods often fails in practice due to the finite size of data sets and because of peculiarities of the software, even when correct substitution models are used. In addition, systematic errors inherent to the method may occur.