Collaborative Research: ABI Development: Enabling discovery across disciplines through a synthesis of time-calibrated evolutionary histories

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This project builds a tree of life calibrated to geologic time, called a timetree of life. A unified computational knowledge-base (TimeTree) synthesizes the results of published research studies and delivers the timetree of life to scientists and the public at large. That is, everyone will be given easy access to knowledge contained in thousands of individual studies that have reported relationships and divergence times among species. Through graphical visualizations and knowledge integration, TimeTree will enable scientists to generate new insights into biological and other phenomena, including connections between Earth history and the evolution of species. Such cross-disciplinary comparisons have previously led to major discoveries in science, where a pattern in one field (e.g., biology) has been explained by a mechanism in another field (e.g., geology). Timetrees are now widely used in diverse fields and are important for researchers who study biodiversity and conservation, and the threat of environmental change to the survival of species now and in the future.TimeTree is accessible to students and scientists freely through the web, smartphones, and tablets, and is used as an educational tool in the classroom. Anyone with a high school education can use TimeTree to find the time of divergence between two species and be in touch with their evolutionary history. TimeTree facilitates basic research in many areas of science from geology to medicine and genomics. Its unique hierarchical synthesis of the world's timetree data integrates into any database, including the major, global, biological databases and cyber-encyclopedias. TimeTree products are served to researchers through a web interface that facilitates in-depth analyses of well-curated data by the community at large. Work on the database itself involves postdoctoral, graduate student, and undergraduate training. More information about this project can be obtained from http://www.timetree.org.