Google Earth Phylogenetics

I’ve been looking for a way to integrate the trees (and networks) I’ve been working on for Karnic with geographic data. I was talking to Russell Gray about this and he mentioned some tools for doing this using Google Earth, and a bit of hunting produced Mesquite and its Cartographer addon. I must say that the documentation and interface for Mesquite is a little clunky (it’s basically a command-line interface in menu form), but it does what I want it to. After a bit of fiddling and prodding I was able to get all the bits of the project (the tree, the language list, the map for display and the coordinate data) to understand each other and I produced this:

There are still some things to work out (and the phylogeny program needs to run another few days and I need to try out some other models before saying ‘this is the definitive tree’) but I’m really happy about how this is going to work as a display and analysis tool.

Update: .kml file.

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