Announcements

SOCIETY OF SYSTEMATIC BIOLOGISTS ANNOUNCEMENTS

It’s easy to join SSB.—For information about joining or renewing your membership, or accessing the journal online as a society member, please visit https://scienceserv.com/ssb.

Queries about society membership can be directed to [email protected].

Systematic Biology has an Open Access option.—Authors have the option of designating their Systematic Biology papers as Open Access. Details are available from Oxford University Press at https://dbpia.nl.go.kr/journals/pages/open_access.

The Society of Systematic Biologists has two student representatives on the council: Kinsey Brock and Sam Church.—Kinsey Brock is a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist studying the evolution of color, morphology, and behavior in lacertid lizards. She is developing a study system with color polymorphic lizards in the Aegean islands to understand which geographic and environmental factors shape patterns of genetic and phenotypic variation within species. Sam is a third-year doctoral candidate advised by Cassandra Extavour at Harvard University. In his research he studies invertebrate evolution and development, currently focusing on the evolution of the insect egg, and he develops software for evolutionary analyses. The SSB student representatives work with the council to support activities and initiatives to better serve our student members.

Systematic Biology would like to announce a new manuscript category.—Spotlights are papers that focus on an empirical system. They could range from broad phylogenetic investigation of large clades to a species delimitation investigation conducted on the phylogeographic scale. In any case, Spotlights should be characterized by their adoption of leading-edge methods and their careful approach to data collection and analysis, but will focus on the evolution of the focal group rather than the methodology used to infer this history. Spotlights should appeal to a broad audience, for example by illustrating how the focal system illustrates key evolutionary processes, but should be primarily system focused. Because this is Systematic Biology, we encourage authors to conduct thorough analyses and describe them in detail. However, authors will be asked to limit Spotlights to 6000 words and no more than 4 figures or tables. In order to achieve both of these goals, authors should make use of supplemental material for the detailed description of their Methods, and provide a short summary of these in the main manuscript. Results & Discussion can be combined if this facilitates a succinct description of the work.

Publisher’s Award.—The journal is delighted to announce the two winners of the 2019 Publisher’s award, which is presented to the two best papers based on student research published in Systematic Biology during the previous year. The two winning papers and winners are:

Kirilee Chaplin, Museum Victoria

Kirilee Chaplin, et al. An Integrative Approach Using Phylogenomics and High-Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography for Species Delimitation in Cryptic Taxa, Systematic Biology, Volume 69, Issue 2, March 2020, Pages 297–307, https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syz048

Miroslav Valan, Stockholm University

Miroslav Valan, et al. Automated Taxonomic Identification of Insects with Expert-Level Accuracy Using Effective Feature Transfer from Convolutional Networks, Systematic Biology, Volume 68, Issue 6, November 2019, Pages 876–895, https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syz014