Teaching with a visual tree of life

Abstract

The extensive data set of evolutionary relationships between organisms is often referred to as the Tree of Life. Providing an effective visual interface for teachers and students to interact with this data set requires bringing together work from many disciplines: computer science, information visualization, human-computer interaction, information classification and retrieval, systematic biology, and evolution education. Through interviews and a survey with teachers and professionals in the field of biology we have developed key recommendations for designing and evaluating the efficacy of existing and future tree-structured data browsers.