Meeting Abstract
Biologists have made major progress in understanding the vast evolutionary Tree of Life, including many aspects of its shape and content, the timing of evolutionary events along its branches, and the patterns and processes of diversification though its history. Despite this progress, a grand challenge remains: to generate and fully exploit large, densely sampled phylogenetic trees, and to integrate resulting genealogies with rich data sources from biodiversity, biogeography, development, morphology, ecology and biomechanics. The FuturePhy project is an NSF-sponsored, three-year program of conferences, workshops and hackathons on the Tree of Life that aims to promote novel, integrative data analyses and visualization, interdisciplinary syntheses in phylogenetic sciences, and cross-cutting uses of phylogenetics to develop and address new research questions and applications. In that context, here we focus this effort by showing several examples of integrating phylogenetic trees with biomechanical data, and discuss the challenges to tree-data integration in evolutionary biomechanics. The solutions to these challenges for a wide range of scientific communities depend on our participation in building publicly accessible repositories for both phylogenetic trees and important trait layers such as ecology, morphology and function. We urge the biomechanics community (and all SICB communities) to participate more fully in data deposition in public repositories, and invite participation by SICB members in upcoming FuturePhy meetings and webinars to discuss integration of large data sets with phylogenetic trees. Supported by NSF DEB-1447321 and IOS-1425049.
