Society of Systematic Biologists

The minutes of the Society of Systematic Biologists Mid-Year Executive Council Meeting (held via Skype) are now available.

Minutes (PDF)

The "Spida of Love" segment from The Colbert Report, featuring Jason Bond is below.

You can purchase items (t-shirts etc.) featuring Aptostichus stephencolberti or the August SB cover, which shows the spider advancing on the California coast. 100% of proceeds go to graduate student programs.

The June 2007 issue has a lot of supplementary data, ranging from NEXUS and BEAST data, files, program scripts, software output, and survey results. These files are now online.

The Google Earth file that accompanies the paper "Genomic Analysis and Geographic Visualization of the Spread of Avian Influenza (H5N1)" (Janies et al., doi:10.1080/10635150701266848, or OpenURL) is available here (aiTrees.kmz).

The paper has received some media coverage. Click on the image (or here) to see a news item from CBS Denver.

by Yehudah L. Werner

Department of Evolution, Systematics and Ecology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91904 Jerusalem, Israel (e-mail: yehudah_w@yahoo.com)

The recent detailed and extensively documented review of taxonomic inflation, by Padial and De la Riva (2006) (doi:10.1080/1063515060081588), of necessity omitted two additional causes for the promotion of subspecies to species. Both causes are almost secret and of both I am only aware through personal involvement with taxonomy and, especially, taxonomists. For both it would be very difficult to collect quantitative data on the frequency of occurrence.

The December 2006 issue is online at informaworld, not the old Taylor and Francis web site.

Literally hot off the press, the October 2006 issue is out. The cover artwork uses an image from Mike Sanderson's 3D tree viewing program Paloverde, which is described in doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl044.

Yes, I know it's been out for a while, but the August issue is out.

UCLA have announced that Dr. Marc Suchard and his former graduate student, Dr. Benjamin Redelings, have won the 2006 Mitchell Prize for their June 2005 article in Systematic Biology, entitled "Joint Bayesian Estimation of Alignment and Phylogeny" (doi:10.1080/10635150590947041).

The supplementary material and data sets for the February issue are finally online. The cover -- based on a photo by Managing Editor Debbie Ciszek -- is timed to coincide with the Darwin Exhibition currently at the American Museum of Natural History.