Nurturing a sustainable Open Tree of Life

The Open Tree of Life project is a collaborative effort to synthesize, share and update a comprehensive tree of life Fig. 1. We have completed a draft synthesis of a tree summarizing digitally available taxonomic and phylogenetic knowledge for all 2.6 million named species, available at tree.opentreeoflife.org Hinchliff et al. 2015. . . This tree provides ready access to phylogenetic information which can link together biodiversity data on the basis of what we know about relevant evolutionary history. Both the unified reference taxonomy Rees and Cranston 2017 and the published phylogenetic statements underlying the tree McTavish et al. 2015 are available and accessible online. Taxa in the phylogenies are mapped to the the reference taxonomy, which aligns Open Tree taxon identifiers to those from NCBI and GBIF, among several other taxonomy resources. The synthesis tree is revised as new data become available, and captures conflict and consensus across different published phylogenetic estimates. This undertaking requires both development of novel infrastructure and analysis tools, as well as community engagement with the Open Tree of Life project. I will discuss the challenges in and the progress towards achieving these goals.