Meeting Abstract
The tree of life metaphor has been used since Darwin to depict the evolutionary relationships among all organisms. To approach this goal, recent advances in sequencing technology, as well a supermatrix and supertree approaches, have helped biologists generated large, well-sampled phylogenies. Using phylogenetic trees has been critical for comparative researchers investigating problems in ecology, evolution, and biodiversity. Although progress has been made in accessing phylogenetic resources, there is still a need for a resource that is comprehensive, scriptable, and easily accessible by researchers of all levels of expertise. We introduce the Fish Tree of Life website and R package fishtree, resources to provide convenient access to sequences, phylogenies, fossil calibrations, and diversification rates for ray-finned fishes. We demonstrate the functionality through its application to phylogenetic inference and comparative studies, and show its ability to integrate with other popular R packages. These tools make access to phylogenies and diversification data accessible to empiricists. We close by showing how we are making progress on both automatic and machine-assisted curated updates to the fish tree of life.
