Collaborative Research: ABI Development: Cultivating a sustainable Open Tree of Life

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For over 150 years, scientists have been classifying different plants, animals, fungi, and microbes based on how these organisms are related to one another. The Open Tree of Life project created a comprehensive website that summarizes these relationships. This website makes it easier for biologists to find previously discovered knowledge about evolutionary relationships and to obtain the data that underlies this knowledge. Understanding the evolutionary relationships between organisms is crucial to answering questions in all areas of biological research. The website is used in research that improves agriculture, fights diseases, conserves biodiversity, ensures food safety, and improves our understanding of basic processes in biology. The Open Tree of Life website also provides students and teachers with up-to-date biological information across the entire tree of life. This project will add several features to the core of the Open Tree of Life project to make it sustainable and to keep the resource up to date.The Open Tree of Life project has built and deployed the first comprehensive tree of life. That project is used by individual biologists and by other informatics projects. This project will ensure the sustainability of the Open Tree of Life effort by adding new features to the user interface that motivate data deposition and curation, improving the rate and reliability of automated procedures for incorporating new data into the tree, and fixing several aspects of the core infrastructure to make the site easier to maintain and cheaper to run. The results of this work will be available at the Open Tree of Life site (https://tree.opentreeoflife.org) throughout the project.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.