1. LET’S GET STARTED

2. Building the First Tree of All Life
Rough draft tree for all 1.8 million named species
Community exercise
Wikipedia-like

3. Family Tree

4. 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.”

5. Earnst Haeckel’s Tree of Life 1866

6. What Took So Long? Building big phylogenetic trees a complex problem
Perfect Storm
Algorithm development
Computational tools and power
DNA sequence revolution

7. A Universe of Possible Trees

8. We are Just One Twig on the Tree of Life
You are here

9. Thoreau’s Woods Walden—best known book Thoreau’s Woods…MA
Henry David Thoreau (1817 –1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, naturalist

10. 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

11. Biodiversity Studies

12. Graph Theory
Smith et al. 2013
PLoS Comput Biol 9(9): e

13. 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

15. Tree of Life

16. Public Tree

17. Public Tree