Integrative insect systematics increasingly combines mitochondrial barcodes, multilocus or genomic data, morphology, geography, ecology and reproductive information, yet species-delimitation outputs are still often presented as if they directly reveal species boundaries. This methodological framework argues that delimitation is more transparent when treated as model choice: investigators specify competing species hypotheses, state the assumptions connecting each evidence class to those hypotheses, compare evidential support, preserve discordance, test sensitivity to priors and thresholds, and report uncertainty before taxonomic action. The framework does not privilege a single species concept or algorithm. Instead, it separates observed evidence, process assumptions, statistical support and taxonomic interpretation. Insect case studies show why this separation matters: coalescent partitions can track population structure, gene flow can blur boundaries, mitochondrial and nuclear signals can disagree, and apparently concordant evidence can still remain conditional on sampling and analytical choices. The proposed architecture therefore treats species delimitation as an auditable sequence of competing explanations rather than an automatic conversion of clusters into names. Its purpose is methodological reproducibility, not universal taxonomic resolution.
