Partly identified taxa are common in phytoplankton monitoring
data, as not all taxa can be indentified to species level under light
microscopy, and also due to variation in taxonomic skills. In the
worst case, unidentified eukaryotewas the best acceptable identity.
Tracing the plethora of taxonomic synonyms in the ever changing
nomenclature, and retrieving the currently accepted scientific
name and authority was based on the World Register of Marine
Species (Costello et al., 2013), by using the on-line Taxon Match
Tool. WoRMS also provides coherent classification of each taxon,
which was used as a coarse proxy of phylogeny, enabling phylogenetic
diversity based data analysis.