"The Path" - Artwork based on the Open Tree of Life

[Paul Sztajer]

I found out about this project last September when you published the draft version, and was inspired by the awesome work you've all done to see what sort of visualisation I could make of the data. 

A few months later, and I produced "The Path", which represents the full database, and I figured I should share it with you guys.

At the bottom of the image, the path represents all 2.3 million species in the database, and it thins out as groups of species separate out to create trees. So the first tree (on the far right) is all Bacteria (well there's a super-thin tree on the right of that representing Archaea, but that's hard to see), the next is (mostly) green plants and algae, the third big one is fungi, and so on (the top third is, predictably, all insects). The big trees all have symbols on them that represent the different groupings, and the leaves are the species themselves.

You can go here for a bigger image, and for a little more information.

So thanks so much for the inspiration - it's been amazing to learn so much about life on the planet by working through the database. I'm currently working on an interactive version of the piece, so if you've got any suggestions for the work or things you'd like to see, please let me know!