delimtools

IMPORTANT

This software is under active development, and as such cannot be assumed to be free of bugs or poor functionality. Always inspect results carefully. If you find a problem, please report it with as much detail as possible in Issues. Unfortunately in its current form, some of the functions (abgd_tbl(), asap_tbl() and mptp_tbl()) will not work natively on Windows operating systems, only on Unix (MacOS, Linux). This is because third party binaries (executable programs) are required. We have implemented a Windows solution by importing results from the webservers that are commonly used to run these analyses, e.g. ABGD, ASAP, and mPTP. There are also difficulties with installing R required package dependancies to run gmyc_tbl() and bgmyc_tbl() because these are no longer under development and available on CRAN, and must be installed from archived sources. Please refer to https://legallab.github.io/delimtools/articles/install.html for instructions on how to install. A tutorial vignette running through all major package functionality is found at https://legallab.github.io/delimtools/articles/delimtools.html.

delimtools v0.3.0 - Announcement

The next major release of delimtools (v0.3.0) will provide native R ports for all species delimitation software currently supported by this package. This means that ABGD, ASAP, bGMYC, GMYC and mPTP, previously dependent on external binaries or third-party R packages, will run entirely within the R environment, with performance-critical likelihood computations handled by embedded C code.

These R ports were developed with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), under continuous human supervision. This porting process prioritezed fidelity to the original source code: algorithms, likelihood functions, and core logic were preserved as closely as possible, with changes limited to what was strictly necessary for integration into the R/C ecosystem.

This change removes the Unix-only restriction that affected several functions in earlier versions, making the full delimtools pipeline available on all platforms, including Windows. Users will no longer need to install or configure standalone executables to run any of the supported methods. All currently implemented wrappers (*_tbl() functions) will continue to be available for comparative purposes for some time, but will eventually be deprecated in the next updates.

Overview

The official GitHub repository for the R package delimtools (Bittencourt, Collins & Hrbek, 2026).

delimtools provides helper functions for the analysis of single-locus species delimitation methods such as GMYC (Monaghan et al., 2009), bGMYC (Reid & Carstens, 2012), mPTP (Kapli et al., 2017) and ASAP (Puillandre et al., 2020). These software run multiple different platforms (e.g. R, Unix, webservers), and also do not output their results in a consistent format to allow easy comparison. To address these shortcomings we have developed a suite of functions to standardise and simplify generating single-locus species delimitations.

Dependencies

Delimtools mainly depends on the tidyverse and ggtree packages. To install these, run the command lines below:

Install tidyverse:

install.packages("tidyverse")

Install ggtree

if (!require("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE))
    install.packages("BiocManager")

BiocManager::install("ggtree")

Installation

To install delimtools you may execute the following commands. We recommend the usage of the latest CRAN release always.

Latest stable version from CRAN

install.packages("delimtools")

Development version from GitHub:

devtools::install_github("LegalLab/delimtools")

Or a specific version via renv:

renv::install("LegalLab/delimtools@v0.1.0")

Examples

Here, we will demonstrate plotting a single-locus species delimitation analysis of a Geophagus eartheater cichlid dataset (Ximenes et al., 2021) using a variety of methods. A tutorial vignette running through all major package functionality is found at https://legallab.github.io/delimtools/articles/delimtools.html.

Redhead Eartheater Geophagus pyrocephalus

library(delimtools)
library(dplyr)

# make tip label table
tip.tab <- geophagus_info |> 
  filter(gbAccession %in% geophagus_beast@phylo$tip.label) |>
  mutate(labs= glue::glue("{gbAccession} | {scientificName}")) |> 
  select(gbAccession, labs, scientificName)

# get cols
cols <- delim_brewer(delim= geophagus_delims, package="randomcoloR", seed=42)

# plot
delim_autoplot(delim = geophagus_delims, 
               tr = geophagus_beast, 
               consensus = TRUE,
               n_match = 4,
               delim_order = c("asap","abgd","locmin","gmyc","bgmyc","ptp", "mptp","morph"),
               tbl_labs = tip.tab, 
               col_vec = cols,
               hexpand = 0.7,
               widths = c(0.5, 0.5))
#> Warning: Using `size` aesthetic for lines was deprecated in ggplot2 3.4.0.
#> ℹ Please use `linewidth` instead.
#> ℹ The deprecated feature was likely used in the ggtree package.
#>   Please report the issue at <https://github.com/YuLab-SMU/ggtree/issues>.
#> This warning is displayed once per session.
#> Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
#> generated.

Current contributors

• Pedro S. Bittencourt
• Rupert A. Collins
• Tomas Hrbek

Meta

• Please report here any issues or bugs or suggestions.
• License: MIT.
• Get citation information for delimtools in R by running citation(package='delimtools').