Open Tree of Life

[2][3] The first draft, including 2.3 million species, was released in September 2015.

[4] The Interactive graph allows the user to zoom in to taxonomic classifications, phylogenetic trees, and information about a node.

Clicking on a species will return its source and reference taxonomy.The project uses a supertree approach to generate a single phylogenetic tree (served at tree.opentreeoflife.org[5]) from a comprehensive taxonomy and a curated set of published phylogenetic estimates.

The taxonomy is a combination of several large classifications produced by other projects; it is created using a software tool called "smasher".

[7] The project was started in June 2012 with a three-year NSF award to researchers at ten universities.