Dear ISoP Members,
As I am sure you all know, our society supports the periodic publication of the higher-level classification (taxonomy) of protists. These large multi-authored papers are important milestones for charting the progress in our understanding of the diversity of protists. They also play a major role in supporting the standing of the society, and especially, supporting the standing of our journal. In this millennium, these summaries have been published every seven years as a special issue of the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology (Adl et al. 2005, 2012, 2019). We are now preparing for the next edition of this classification, with this process seeing both continuity and change.
Our plan is that the next ‘ISoP classification’ will be presented in the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology in a special publication in 2026. As with previous editions, this publication will focus on communicating higher-level classification, and it will be the effort of a large community of authors. This iteration of the classification will be assembled in co-ordination with a thematically related initiative, Eukmap, which was developed as a part of the Unieuk program. This has been built, supported or steered by several members of ISoP, and supported by ISoP itself (while predominantly funded by the Moore Foundation). Eukmap is an online framework to support taxonomy curation, which will allow taxonomic changes that were introduced in the literature to be communicated by the broad community, with vetting by group-specialist curators. It is also a very useful tool for navigating protist taxonomy online (https://eukmap.unieuk.net/taxonomy). Amongst other things, Eukmap covers taxa down to the species level, thus should more directly link the higher taxonomy – the hallmark of prior ISoP classifications – to listings of genera and species, and Eukmap already goes down to species level in many protist groups.
Updating the taxonomy will begin in earnest in 2025, and we hope mostly completed over that year. We will be reaching out to previous contributors to ISoP classification papers, but welcome interest from other experts who are interested in contributing to curating, and thus co-authoring, the taxonomy. We are especially keen to hear from experts whose groups are not yet fully covered in Eukmap.
Alastair Simpson
Chair
