I've published a short note on my work on geophylogenies and GeoJSON in PLoS Currents Tree of Life : At the time of writing the DOI hasn't registered, so the direct link is here. There is a GitHub repository for the manuscript and code. I chose PLoS Currents Tree of Life because it is (supposedly) quick and cheap.

For the last few weeks I've been working on a little project to display phylogenies on web-based maps such as OpenStreetMap and Google Maps. Below I'll sketch out the rationale, but if you're in a hurry you can see a live demo here: http://iphylo.org/~rpage/geojson-phylogeny-demo/, and some examples below.

As part of my mantra that it's not about the data, it's all about the links between the data, I've started exploring matching GenBank sequences to GBIF occurrences using the specimen_voucher codes recorded in GenBank sequences. It's quickly becoming apparent that this is not going to be easy.

One thing which has always frustrated me about geophylogenies is how tedious they are to create. In theory, they should be pretty straightforward to generate. We take a tree, get point localities for each leaf in the tree, and generate the KML to display on Google Earth. The tedious part is getting the latitude and longitude data in the right format, and linking the leaves in the tree to the locality data.