The Tree of Life Project: A Digital Library of Biodiversity Information

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is an open-access, database-driven system providing information over the Internet about biodiversity and phylogeny of all organisms. It contains state-of-the-art content contributed by researchers who are experts in particular groups of organisms, compiled collaboratively by more than 350 biologists from over 20 different countries. The ToL currently provides over 3000 web pages with scientific content to approximately 50,000 visitors per week. Originally designed as a tool for biological research, the project has widened its scope in response to interest shown from K-16 students, science educators, and the general public. Its initial goals were to describe the characteristics of the world's organisms and their phylogenetic relationships, to promote an appreciation for biodiversity, and to encourage and facilitate research about biodiversity and phylogeny. The ToL now seeks to collect more materials that are aimed at diverse, non-specialist audiences. This project aims to achieve four main goals: 1) Improve core scientific content of the ToL collection, focusing on important groups (protists, fungi, flowering plants, insects, and dinosaurs) that are currently underrepresented and that include model organisms and organisms of economic significance; they also include the majority of known species on Earth. These are also groups of special appeal to K-16 learners. 2) Implement new technical features focusing on needs of users from the education and research communities. Examples of such features include a presentation system that allows visitors to customize views of site content and tools that facilitate collaborative projects between different user communities. Implementation of Gateway to Educational Materials cataloguing tools and instructional metadata will make it possible for the project to share learning objects with other collections. 3) Initiate collection of content specifically aimed at K-16 learners, including exercises, lesson plans, media, educational games, news items, and user-generated materials. 4)Develop and implement robust policies pertaining to the administrative structure of the ToL (archiving, editorial policies, peer-review, intellectual property rights, etc.) As well as providing detailed, expert content, a notable merit of the ToL is its presentation of the evolutionary tree of life as an integrated whole. The navigational structure of the project is in one-to-one correspondence with the basic structure of evolutionary history. In navigating through the ToL, users are thus instilled with a vision of the genetic connectedness of all life, the cornerstone of modern biological knowledge and its organization. Facilitating the casual or systematic exploration of broad-scale patterns, this approach encourages both K-16 learners and researchers to trace the distribution of characteristics across the branches of the tree and to ponder the forces that may have shaped the observed diversity of living things. The architecture of the project, based upon the connections between the subjects it sets out to catalogue and describe, also makes the ToL an ideal tool for the investigation of learning technology interfaces. The ToL has broad impact within and beyond the biodiversity research community. A community-oriented administrative model encourages interdisciplinary and international collaborations, and the project is designed to facilitate the sharing of content and open-source software tools with other projects. In addition, the ToL provides scientists with a platform for the dissemination of research results to the general public. In providing the highest-quality content contributed by specialists, and yet presenting this in a way that is accessible to non-specialists, the ToL also facilitates life-long learning in the larger community of visitors to the web. The proposed project is significantly enhancing the impact of the ToL by (1) extending its content in key groups of organisms, (2) rebuilding its architecture to add features specifically designed for educational users and those with disabilities, and (3) integrating its content with other educational resources, thereby improving services for our diverse user communities. The Division of Environmental Biology in the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences is providing significant co-funding for this project in recognition of the role ToL is playing in advancing the educational goals of the Directorate.