XVI International Botanical Congess

In recent years there has been an explosive growth in the number of published phylogenetic trees. TreeBASE was developed to harness this information and to provide a tool to study the evolution of biodiversity. Access to phylogenetic trees, and to the data underlying those trees, is needed for a wide variety of purposes, including comparative studies of morphological and molecular evolution, biogeography, coevolution, and studies of congruence of results based on different sources of evidence. Such data are also needed to monitor progress in phylogenetic research, to test new methods of analysis, and to address immediate practical problems in conservation of biodiversity. TreeBASE stores published phylogenetic trees, data matrices, bibliographic information, taxonomic names, characters states, algorithms used, and analyses performed. The database is designed to allow retrieval for more detailed analysis of trees and data, and it can be explored interactively using trees included in the database. TreeBASE therefore provides a means of assessing and synthesizing knowledge of phylogenetic information and biodiversity.