Science has no universally applicable standard for how to delineate species, and (as has been discussed on this forum several times, including here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-do-some-genera-have-so-many-species/18452 ) is unlikely to ever do so. A species is functionally “A group of related organisms considered (in publication) by a taxonomist of that group to be a species, using whatever standard or definition that taxonomist preferred at the moment the analysis was performed.”
This being unfortunately true, discussions about distributions of species are extremely prone to being mostly semantics.
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