A single tree can tell us about every living organism on Earth. This tree, with insights dating back billions of years, is the Tree of Life, and it took root in Tucson.
Driven by his love for all organisms, David Maddison, a University of Arizona professor of entomology, wanted to create a Web site to virtually organize all species on Earth with the help of others who shared his vision. The desire became the Tree of Life Web Project, and Maddison is its director.
It's hard to see biodiversity without seeing it through the lens of a phylogenetic tree, Maddison said, referring to the field of study examining the relatedness of organisms.
Nearly 3 million visitors a year click on the site — www.tolweb.org/tree — to explore biology, and now the Tree of Life may branch out to an even larger site that shares some of the same goals to present the diversity of life.
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The Tree of Life grew from the system of biologists mapping evolutionary history with phylogenetic trees — the "family trees" of related organisms, only with the ancestor at the root and existing species on the highest branches. In reaching this goal, the creators have encouraged others to contribute information they have collected on species to add leaves to the tree.
If you want to document the Tree of Life, you must also document the past and how it got there, Maddison said.
Maddison wanted people to be able to click on branches and learn about each species in detail. He shared the idea with his brother, Wayne Maddison, and other collaborators.
"I talked to Wayne about it, and we decided to just start it up," Maddison said.
"The first twinkling of it was in the late '80s," Maddison said, although it was in a different format because of the technological changes having taken place over the years.
The Tree of Life is discussing a merger with the Encyclopedia of Life — a Web site launched to catalog living species — because of their shared interests.
Before the Encyclopedia of Life, the Tree of Life was the only project focusing on all life on Earth, Maddison said, but "we split up the pie."
This would allow the Tree of Life to grow rapidly with more help and funds.
"There are 1.75 million species on the planet, and it's always been our goal to document all that," said Katja Schulz, the Tree of Life managing editor, counting the number of known species.
If the Tree of Life alone adds 800 species a year, Schulz said, it would take thousands of years to complete the tree. It's amazing how little that people understand about the world around us, yet spend so much money to go into space, she said. With some species, we just know they're there but don't know anything about them, she added.
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Treehouses have always opened up a new world for children, but the Tree of Life Web Project opens a treehouse to all ages.
Treehouses on the Tree of Life Web site are about researching any organism, at any age, and making a contribution to science. One of the first things City High School science teacher Jeff Hartman has his class do every year is search the Tree of Life and find the eco- bottle project he contributed as a Treehouse learning project... Click here to read the full story
