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Abstract
The importance of improving Reticulitermes taxonomy has been reiterated numerous times since the early 1960s. This work contains two different but complementary sections targeted at improving the systematics of Reticulitermes with a focus on the southeastern region of the United States. A formal description for a new species, Reticulitermes nelsonae is the provided as part of this dissertation. The first section is a morphological study of the alate and soldier castes to identify better supported and additional morphological characters to build an improved dichotomous and online, interactive matrix key for Reticulitermes. The second portion consists of generic-level phylogenetic analyses based on two different genomic DNA regions utilizing distance, parsimony, and likelihood software methodologies.