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SYNTHESYS NA-D
The EU synthesis of systematic resources

EDIT WP5
The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy

RMCA
The Royal Museum for Central Africa

Phylogeographic visualisation

the idea

For the ItinTool, we have been playing around with Google Earth and KML files. At the same time, we are in close contact with our JEMU molecular unit, who asked about possibilities of visualisation for phylogenetic trees.
Inspired by examples such as GeoPhyloBuilder , the work of Roderic Page and others , RMCA developed a proof-of-concept tool.

The link with the ItinTool was obvious : both itineraries and phylogeny trees consist of located data points (with x,y,z coordinates) and a structural description of their connection :

• a is connected to c through b
• distance between two points
• hierarchy of connections

The ItinTool has got the modules for CSV input and KML output, and the processing structures describing the itinerary data points can be used for storing phylogeny trees as well. All that was really new here was a parser for the phylogenetic tree format.

The work flow :

1. the tool takes in the point coordinates in a simple CSV (ItinTool CSV module)
2. the tool takes in a corresponding nexus treefile with the phylogenetic tree structure
3. the tool puts out a KML