The most comprehensive tree of life ever created hasPukiWikiPukiWikiPukiWikis that connect 2.2 million living species on Earth.
It allows people to find their favorite living things, be they golden moles or giant sequoias, and see how evolutionary history connects them together to create a giant tree of all life on Earth.
The interactive website OneZoom allows us to explore the relationships between all the flavors of life.
"We hope to give people a completely new way to appreciate the diversity of life on Earth in all it's beauty," said Imperial College London biodiversity researcher James Rosindell.
There are two million species and no museum or zoo can hold all of them. Our tool can help visitors understand the plight of all Earth's species.
Each leaf on the tree is a species. Clicking on a species's scientific and common names will bring up a list of options for further information, including encyclopedia entries and access to genetic information.
The creators of the tree encourage people to use the public domain images of 85,000 species.
The project has been viewed by over 1.5 million unique users and is a non-profit charity. It relies on people to adopt a species. 800 people have signed up as sponsors, which means they can include a name or message on the leaf.
The leaves are green and red to show how vulnerable each species is to extinction. Many of the leaves are gray, which shows how little knowledge we have.
The color scheme of the IUCN leaves. OneZoom.
"It's amazing how much research is still to be done," said Wong.
We hope to send a powerful message by making the tree easy to explore for everyone, and we have worked hard to make the tree easy to explore for everyone.
The new paper by Wong and Rosindell shows how they arranged OneZoom according to their genetic relationships to one another, rather than traditional taxonomy.
Traditional classifications like "fish" don't reflect the true relationships between species as mammals are more closely related to some fish than to others.
OneZoom.
The creation of big-data beauty has fun features like a species popularity index.
The grey wolf is the second most popular animal, but it has swapped places a few times with humans. Cannabis is the most popular plant followed by cabbage.
OneZoom.
This feature could be useful.
The researchers wrote that the popularity index has the potential to inform the efforts to conserve.
It took Wong and his colleagues over a decade to accumulate all the databases, but there's still a lot more to be done.
The team believes that they have realized the original vision of OneZoom, which was to create a complete and engaging tree of life explorer.
It's possible that OneZoom can help scientists discover new patterns in nature and educate people about evolution, biodiversity, and conservativism, as well as facilitate guided tours of the tree made by volunteers to help engage the public.
Many venues will be interested in using it to complement their existing displays now that the project is complete.
The team's research can be found in Methods in Ecology and Evolution and can be found at OneZoom.org.
