Description: Blog by Rod Page on biodiversity informatics, taxonomy, systematics, phylogeny, knowledge graphs, and other topics.
Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed . ISSN 2051-8188. Written content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license .
GBIF recently released the Phylogeny Explorer , using legumes as an example dataset. The goal is to enables users to “view occurrence data from the GBIF network aligned to legume phylogeny.” The screenshot below shows the legume phylogeny side-by-side with GBIF data.
Now, I’m all in favour of integrating phylogenies and occurrence data, and I have a lot of respect for the people behind this project (Morten Høfft and Thomas Stjernegaard Jeppesen), but I think this way of displaying a phylogeny has multiple problems. Indeed, it suffers from many of the classic “mistakes” people make when trying to view big trees.