Lifemap: Exploring the Entire Tree of Life
Fig 1
Three successive zoom levels in Lifemap illustrating the half-circle representation employed.
Each clade is represented by a half-circle whose size depends on the relative number of species in the clade as compared to its sister clades at a given level. Note that these proportions are not respected at the tree root where the three superkingdoms are arbitrarily given the same size. Computation of the size of each half-circle is based on the angle they are associated with (α and β on the first panel): if nA and nB are the number of species in clades A and B, respectively, the angles in degrees are computed as follows: and
. The square root reduces the difference in half-circle sizes between very small and very large groups. At every level, the half-circles (clades) are randomly distributed within their parental half-circle.