Using the Open Tree of Life for your Research -- with R!: Glossary

Key Points

Package version
  • Package version is key for science reproducibility, and you can document it using the function packageVersion().

Finding your taxa in the Open Tree of Life Taxonomy
  • Open Tree of Life Taxonomy ids, or OTT ids are unique numeric identifiers for individual taxa that the Open Tree of Life project uses to handle taxonomy.

  • You can go from a scientific name to an OTT id using TNRS matching.

  • You can not go from a common name to OTT id using the Open Tree of Life tools.

Getting a piece of the Synthetic Open Tree of Life
  • OTT ids and node ids allow us to interact with the synthetic OpenTree.

  • Portions of the synthetic OpenTree can be extracted from a single OTT id or from a bunch of OTT ids

  • It is not possible to get a subtree from an OTT id that is not in the synthetic tree.

Dealing with "broken" and "invalid" taxa
  • It is not possible to get a subtre from an OTT id that is not in the synthetic tree.

  • OTT ids and node ids allow us to interact with the synthetic OpenTree.

Getting an induced subtree of all taxa within a taxonomic rank
  • It is possible to get all types of subsets from the synthetic tree, as long as you can get the OTT ids!

Getting studies and trees supporting relationships in a synthetic subtree
  • Supporting trees usually contain more taxa than the ones we are interested in.

Getting branch length information (proportional to time) for you taxa
  • datelife stores all chronograms from the Open Tree of Life phylesystem.

  • chronograms are stored in the opentree_chronograms object.

  • source chronograms are retrieved at the species level only (for now).

Summarizing branch length information
  • Source chronograms have a wide range of variation in age estimates.

Glossary

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