Understanding how the Earth ‘works’ and how life in all its wonderful forms (biodiversity) came into existence has been a core interest throughout my life. In 2006, I created the first ‘geophylogeny’ by georeferencing an evolutionary tree of the Goodeid family of Mexican Freshwater fish (Kidd and Ritchie 2006) that lead to a post-doc at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina where I wrote the Geophylobuilder (Kidd and Liu 2008) software for geocoding evolutionary trees. Fun was had making engaging visuals but interest soon waned as they lacked a solid theoretical underpinning and failed to provide meaningful insight despite their potential as a means of integrating disparate data (Kidd 2010). Fifteen years later, the Terrestrial Mammal Geophylogeny dashboard presents the results of the first analytical geophylogenetic analysis of a large evolutionary tree.
Kidd, D. M. (2010). ‘Geophylogenies and the Map of Life’. Systematic Biology, 59(6), 741–752.
Kidd, D. M., & Liu, X. (2008). ‘GEOPHYLOBUILDER 1.0: an ArcGIS extension for creating “geophylogenies”’. Molecular Ecology Resources, 8, 88–91.
Kidd, D. M., & Ritchie, M. G. (2006). ‘Phylogeographic information systems; putting the geography into phylogeography.’ Journal of Biogeography, 33, 1851–1865.