Spider: SPecies IDentity and Evolution in R, is a new R package implementing a number of useful analyses for DNA barcoding studies and associated research into species delimitation and speciation. Included are functions essential for generating important summary statistics from DNA barcode data, assessing specimen identification efficacy, and for testing and optimising divergence threshold limits. In terms of investigating evolutionary and taxonomic questions, techniques for assessing diagnostic nucleotides and probability of reciprocal monophyly are also provided. Additionally, a sliding window function offers opportunities to analyse information across a gene, essential for marker design in degraded DNA studies. Spider capitalises on R's extensible ethos, and offers an integrated platform ideal for the analysis of both nucleotide and morphological data.

Spider is available as a stable version from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN; http://cran.r-project.org) and as a development version from R-Forge . It is intended that further developments of the package will include additional methods for the analysis of DNA, morphological and spatial data.