Available in English Commercial no Launched September 2015 | Website opentreeoflife.org Registration not required Current status active | |
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The Open Tree of Life is an on-line phylogenetic tree of life – a collaborative effort, funded by the NSF AVAToL #1208809. The first draft, including 2.3 million species, was released in September 2015. The Interactive graph allows the user to zoom in to taxonomic classifications, phylogenetic trees, and information about a node. Clicking on a species will return its source and reference taxonomy.
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Approach
The project uses a supertree approach to generate a single phylogenetic tree (served at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/) from a comprehensive taxonomy and a curated set of published phylogenetic estimates.
The taxonomy is a combination of several large classifications produced by other projects; it is created using a software tool called "smasher". The resulting taxonomy (the Open Tree Taxonomy, OTT) can be browsed at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/taxonomy/browse.
The set of phylogenetic estimates that are inputs to the supertree method are curated via a web application (at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/curator). Any user with a GitHub login is permitted to curate a tree. Curation activities include:
The curated data store is available for use by others as git repository. All software produced by the project is available under open source licenses; see http://opentreeoflife.github.io/ for links to the code, data, and documentation.
History
The project was started in June 2012 with a three-year NSF award to researchers at ten universities. In 2015, a two-year supplemental award was made to researchers at three institutions.