OneZoom: Tree of life branches out online | Science Codex

"Exploring the evolutionary tree of life is now as easy as navigating an online map, thanks to a new interactive website called OneZoom, which went live today. All living species on Earth descended from a common ancestor that lived in the distant past. Since Darwin, biologists have struggled to draw a 'tree' showing important details about the many known living organisms and how they are related to one another. However, even relatively small trees have been challenging to visualize without huge sheets of paper or multiple computer screens. OneZoom, inspired by the zooming technology of online map viewers, makes it possible to start with a broad view of life on earth, then zoom in on any point to explore incrementally smaller categories of life, using intuitive mouse actions. Dr. James Rosindell, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, conceptualized and programmed OneZoom in collaboration with Dr. Luke Harmon, from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Idaho. 'OneZoom gives you a natural way to explore large amounts of complex information like the tree of life,' explained Rosindell. 'It's intuitive because it's similar to the way we explore the real world by moving towards interesting objects to see them in more detail.'  'We're still looking at data on the screen in ways that can easily be printed on paper and that's a serious visual constraint. In fact it's no longer necessary to restrict ourselves in this way because we now mostly view the information on a screen only. OneZoom embraces this by laying out the data in an exciting, interactive way that could not be captured on printed sheets' he said.  OneZoom looks initially like a tree, with trunk, branches, twigs and each species represented by a coloured leaf. As you travel along the trunk towards the first branches, it's easy to zoom in and out, pan around, and explore the evolutionary links between different species of organism, as though they were roads on a map. By zooming in on each subgroup of organisms more details about them are revealed, such as the degree to which their members are threatened with extinction, along with links to more information, and soon photographs.  Currently the OneZoom site only features the tree of mammals, but this includes over 5000 species that are arranged in closely related groups and colour-coded to indicate extinction risk. Dr Rosindell aims to complete the next stages of the project over the coming years. This will involve growing the scope of OneZoom and refining its content as more data becomes available from international research projects, such as the Open Tree of Life Project."