LET’S GET STARTED
Building the First Tree of All Life Rough draft tree for all 1.8 million named species Community exercise Wikipedia-like
Family Tree
From Darwin’s The Origin of Species “As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.”
Earnst Haeckel’s Tree of Life 1866
What Took So Long? Building big phylogenetic trees a complex problem Perfect Storm Algorithm development Computational tools and power DNA sequence revolution
A Universe of Possible Trees
We are Just One Twig on the Tree of Life You are here
Thoreau’s Woods Walden—best known book Thoreau’s Woods…MA Henry David Thoreau (1817 –1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, naturalist
Phylogenetic loss of species related to climate change in Thoreau’s Woods Groups in decline shown in pink on phylogeny. These species have been unable to adjust their flowering time to increasing mean annual temperature. Willis et al. 2008 10
Biodiversity Studies
Graph Theory Smith et al. 2013 PLoS Comput Biol 9(9): e1003223.
Building the Tree of Life Rough tree for all 1.8 million described species Then becomes a community exercise Tools (incentives) to allow researchers to edit (annotate) portions of the tree Include fossils—”tree of life and death” Wikipedia-like, but many trees possible for a clade Public Tree—Educational materials http://blog.opentreeoflife.org/
Tree of Life
Public Tree
Public Tree