The Megaselia of Sweden
Period: 2017-2019
Funding: SLU Artdatabanken Sweden (2,900,000 SEK)
Project leader: Emily Hartop
My project is on the taxonomy and diversity of a group of scuttle flies (genus Megaselia, family Phoridae) in Sweden. I am using material collected by the Swedish Malaise Trap Project (SMTP) for this research. An amateur on the group, Sven Olof Ulefors, has been working on this material for many years in Småland and my focus is on bringing the work he has done to publication. Primarily, this work deals with the description of new species. Sven Olof has identified hundreds of unique flies from the SMTP material that could be new to science. My job is to go through those flies and determine which ones can now be published for the world to see!
Hartop, E., Häggqvist, S., Ulefors, S. O., & Ronquist, F. (2021). Scuttling towards monophyly: phylogeny of the mega-diverse genus Megaselia (Diptera: Phoridae). Systematic Entomology, 46(1), 71-82.
Hartop, E., Srivathsan, A., Ronquist, F., & Meier, R. (2022). Towards large-scale integrative taxonomy (LIT): resolving the data conundrum for dark taxa. Systematic Biology, 71(6), 1404-1422.