OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer at the British Library

The British Library has just opened their first science exhibition, "Beautiful Science" on the 20th February.

In April, we are holding a workshop to develop new plans for monitoring the health of forest mycorrhizal communities and of the forests they support. We will be bringing together new research tools developed at Imperial College London to map mycorrhizal diversity, increasing amounts of data from soil biomonitoring programmes, and the expertise of a wide range of partners including ICP Forests, IUCN, JNCC, Woodland Trust, Forest Research, British Mycological Society and Earthwatch. Fungi are a new frontier for conservation efforts and this workshop will help map out a new initiative in preserving and protecting this little known but vital group.

The exhibition focused on the visualisation of data in three themes: evolution, public health and the weather.

The OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer was featured as a key interactive in the evolution section alongside a first edition copy of Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species" and many further examples of data visualisation. Londonist.com described the OneZoom exhibit as "a staggering bit of fractal visualisation from Imperial College, in which the interrelatedness of animal speciesare shown in one highly intuitive zoomable tree."

OneZoom was developed by James Rosindell, an Imperial College GCEE researcher who is funded by a NERC fellowship. A version of the software can be seen online at www.onezoom.org however, the Beautiful Science exhibit has been redeveloped for a multi-touch display and includes thousands of embedded images and sounds from the British Library’s sound archive that cannot be seen online. Beautiful Science is open until the 26th of May and is just a short walk from Kings Cross Station, London.