#GOOGLE EARTH MOON SECRETS SOFTWARE#

Uniquely, to support this charity, each leaf on the tree is available for sponsorship, allowing anyone to ‘adopt’ a species and enabling OneZoom to continue its mission. We hope that now this project is complete and available, many venues will be interested in using it to complement their existing displays.”ĭrs Rosindell and Wong have also set up a OneZoom charity with the aim of using their tree of life to “advance the education of the public in the subjects of evolution, biodiversity, and conservation of the variety of life on Earth.” Rosindell commented: “Two million species can feel like a number too big to visualize, and no museum or zoo can hold all of them! But our tool can help represent all Earth’s species and allow visitors to connect with their plight.

#GOOGLE EARTH MOON SECRETS SOFTWARE#

The OneZoom explorer is configured to work with touchscreens, and the developers have made the software free to download and use by educational organizations such as museums and zoos.ĭr.

Building the OneZoom tree of life was only possible through sophisticated methods to gather and combine existing data – it would have been impossible to curate all this by hand.” Wong added: “It’s extraordinary how much research there is still to be done.

Even among the species described by science, only a tiny fraction have been studied or have a known risk of extinction.ĭr. However, most of the leaves on the tree are grey, meaning they have not been evaluated, or scientists don’t have enough data to know their extinction risk. The ‘leaves’ representing each species on the tree are color-coded depending on their risk of extinction: green for not threatened, red for threatened, and black for recently extinct. Rosindell, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: “We have worked hard to make the tree easy to explore for everyone, and we also hope to send a powerful message: that much of our biodiversity is under threat.” 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.”ĭr.

Wong, from the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford, said: “By developing new algorithms for visualization and data processing, and combining them with ‘big data’ gathered from multiple sources, we’ve created something beautiful. In a paper published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Drs Wong and Rosindell present the result of over ten years of work, gradually creating what they regard as “the Google Earth of biology.”ĭr. James Rosindell and University of Oxford evolutionary biologist Dr. OneZoom was developed by Imperial College London biodiversity researcher Dr. The explorer also includes images of over 85,000 species, plus, where known, their vulnerability to extinction. The interactive tree of life allows users to zoom in to any species and explore its relationships with others, in a seamless visualisation on a single web page. The OneZoom explorer – available at – maps the connections between 2.2 million living species, the closest thing yet to a single view of all species known to science. OneZoom is a one-stop site for exploring all life on Earth, its evolutionary history, and how much of it is threatened with extinction.

Screenshot from the OneZoom tree of life explorer with leaves colored according to extinction risk and showing the ‘spiral’ view of the tree.

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