THIS PIECE WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED ON THE ROPENSCI BLOG.
We (Francois Michonneau, Joseph Brown and David Winter) are excited to announce a paper describing rotl, our package for the Open Tree of Life data, has been published. The full citation is:
Michonneau, F., Brown, J. W., Winter, D. J. (2016), rotl: an R package to interact with the Open Tree of Life data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.12593
The paper, which is freely available, describes the package and the data it wraps in detail. Rather than rehash the information here, we will use this post to briefly introduce the goals of the package and thank some of the people that helped it come to be.
What Data Does Open Tree Have and How Can rotl Help You Get It?
The Open Tree of Life combines knowledge from thousands of scientific studies to produce a single source of information about the relationships among all species on earth. In addition to storing the trees and taxonomies that go into this project, the Open Tree provides a “synthesis tree” that represents this combined knowledge. The Open Tree data can be accessed via the web page linked above, and through an API. rotl takes advantage of this API to give R users the ability to search for phylogenetic information and import the results into their R sessions. The imported data can then be used with the growing ecosystem of packages for phylogenetic and comparative biology in R. Continue reading
