Applicability for species discrimination SpeciesIdentifier software and a tree-based method (NJ) were employed to evaluate species delimitation of Clematis (Table 4 and Fig. 2). Based on the “best match” and “best close match” models, atpB-rbcL from the chloroplast genome showed the best discriminatory power (even better than that of the combined data in the “best close match” model), followed by ITS and ETS, whereas accD and rpl16 introns showed the poorest rate of identification success (Table 4). The combined data showed that the best discriminatory power was achieved using the “best match” model, which detected the highest percentage of monophyletic taxa in the NJ tree (Table 4).