Tree of Life

“Dealing with conservation is about dealing with people, not about dealing with animails (and plants)" — Sarah Hauck

Tree of Life — A map of the relationships between all life on earth — A metaphor for the importance and connectivity of all species — Aiming to increase public understanding of conservation and biodiversity. The knowledge of Tree of Life has many practical applications which will benifit ourselves.

Under this big project, I have mainly involved fowllowing two subset projects as primary researcher:

1. Rosid Phylogeny and Diversification We recently used 5-locus, 19,740-taxon supermatrix to investigate the sampling bias of rosid in GenBank, and how sampling differences may influence the phylogeny and downstream diversification analyses (See rosids Project);

2. The Tree of Life: China project ( Chen et al., 2016) We build a tree of life for the plants of China (~30,000 flowering plant species), uncovering a distinct regional pattern in biodiversity. Eastern China is a floral “museum” with a rich array of ancient lineages and distant relatives while the western provinces are an evolutionary “cradle” for newer and more closely related species. More detail see Lu et al. (2018).