Subgenus Aciandrena Warncke, 1968 The subgenus Aciandrena is species-rich and contains a swarm of poorly-understood or undescribed diversity in dry desert and Mediterranean environments in North Africa and the Middle East. Females are often inseparable, and genetic analyses or the usually distinctive male genital capsules are typically required to define species boundaries (e.g., Wood et al. 2020; Pisanty et al. 2022a). Moreover, the subgenus Aciandrena sensu Warncke is polyphyletic and contains multiple lineages (Pisanty et al. 2022b). This can be seen to a certain extent with COI analysis (Fig. 1), although COI analysis has limited power to resolve deeper phylogenetic relationships (Trunz et al. 2016, though see also Talavera et al. 2022). At the present time, it is not clear how to effectively differentiate these lineages, and so a broad Aciandrena concept is adopted here. A specimen from high altitude in the Middle Atlas generated a sequence that is closest to two eastern species, A. curviocciput Pisanty & Wood, 2022 (12.77%; Israel, Lebanon, Turkey) and A. israelica Scheuchl & Pisanty, 2016 (13.03%, range 12.64–13.42%; Turkey, Syria, Israel and the West Bank, Jordan). The species is also morphologically distinct from these comparison species, and it is described below as Andrena ifranensis sp. nov.

Published as part of Wood, Thomas James, 2023, Revisions to the Andrena fauna of north-western Africa with a focus on Morocco (Hymenoptera: Andrenidae), pp. 1-85 in European Journal of Taxonomy 916 (1) on page 4, DOI: 10.5852/ejt.2023.916.2381, http://zenodo.org/record/10453460