LepTaxonTree is an interactive tree visualization program designed to facilitate exploration of the very large phylogeny of Lepidoptera. At present only the phylogeny can be accessed, but eventually the taxon names will be linked to other fields of the Lepidoptera knowledge base, allowing all of this information to be explored phylo-graphically.

The initial tree structure and taxon names displayed follow the Arizona Tree of Life project, supplemented by names from the ITIS data base (see below). This mostly provisional and substantially unresolved tree will change as phylogenetic research progresses.

LepTaxonTree requires Java 1.5 [1].

Launch LepTaxonTree [1] via Java Web Start.

[1]

About LepTaxonTree

LepTaxonTree was originally developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab [2] at the University of Maryland. Its original application allowed browsing and searching of University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web [3] database. The Laboratory of Molecular Evolution [4] in the Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology [5] and HCIL have modified the application in order to display the phylogeny of Lepidoptera we currently have.

LepTaxonTree's information is extracted from the Tree of Life (TOL) [6] website's XML dump once a week. We also use the Spire [7] project's OWL representation of the ITIS [8] names database. The information is stored in and served from Sesame [9] triple store repositories.

The TOL tree topology is currently shown by default, but ITIS names have been "grafted" onto branches (indicated by green arrows) where no TOL information is available.

Newick format
We provide three Newick files for LepTaxonTree data so that you may use them in your own analyses. Each file is generated weekly from our OWL data.
Download: Tree of Life, [9]  ITIS, [9]  Grafted (combined) tree [9]