Taxonomy and systematics build the foundation for studying relationships among organisms and provide the phylogenetic context required by comparative studies and conservation biology. Despite recent revisions of the morphological classification of sponges, the taxonomy of many sponge orders remains problematic. The Porifera Tree of Life project is constructing a definitive phylogeny of sponges, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Assembling the Tree of Life program. We are integrating morphological and molecular approaches to systematics across the immense biodiversity represented by the four classes of sponges.

Two projects build on the Porifera Tree of Life by developing bioinformatic tools that can be applied to all taxonomic groups. Arbor: Comparative Analysis Workflows for the Tree of Life is a novel software package for comparative evolutionary analyses. Our software is designed to place tree-thinking tools into the hands of scientists across multiple disciplines, enabling rapid advances in integrative and comparative biology at multiple phylogenetic and spatiotemporal scales. Next Generation Phenomics for the Tree of Life combines text mining, image analysis, and machine learning software to automate phenotypic character discovery and scoring from publications and images.