Diversity of Spiders (Araneae: Pholcidae) in China's Lüliang Mountains: An Integrated Morphological and Molecular Approach.

Spiders of the genus were collected for the first time during an expedition to the Lüliang Mountains in Shanxi Province, North China. Phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequence data from COI, H3, wnt, and 28S genes allowed us to group them into nine well-supported clades. We used morphology and four methods of molecular species delimitation, namely Automatic Barcode Gap Discovery (ABGD), the Generalized Mixed Yule Coalescent (GMYC), Bayesian Poisson Tree Processes (bPTP), and Bayesian Phylogenetics and Phylogeography (BPP), to investigate species boundaries. These integrative taxonomic analyses identified the nine clades as nine distinct species, comprising Peng & Zhang, 2013 and eight other species new to science: sp. nov., sp. nov., sp. nov., sp. nov., sp. nov., sp. nov., sp. nov., and sp. nov. The species occur in geographic proximity and show many morphological similarities. All of them belong to the species group. The records from the Lüliang Mountains represent the westernmost distribution limit of this species group.