Under the invisibility cape: the secret world of Aneura pinguis in Europe and Greenland

Multiple accessions of the simple thalloid liverwort Aneura from around the world, but with particular focus on western Europe, have been sequenced for a range of standard plastid DNA barcoding markers: rbcL, matK, psbA-trnH, rpoC1 and trnL-trnF, and the nuclear ITS marker. Our data set on the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD) currently contains some DNA barcode data for 433 accessions of Aneura. Data for an additional 386 Aneura accessions are available from GenBank or from BOLD. Using tree-building methods, we consider that at least twelve well-sampled and supported lineages within Europe and Greenland merit recognition at the species level. Studies of the ecology and morphology of these lineages have revealed some morphological characters that match the genetic lineages. In this paper, we describe ten new species of Aneura, based on a combination of molecular and morphological data.