Endorsements and impacts of OneZoom

Endorsements

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If you like our tree of life explorer, please e-mail us your comments to add to this page.

• Scientists

  • The best tool I’ve seen for exploring the tree of life on this planet.

  • Magnificent piece of software, brilliantly intuitive visualisation of the tree of life

  • OneZoom is a brilliant, interactive tool for understanding the scope and scale of the tree of life, including highlights for conservation priorities.

  • This project has enormous potential both as a tool for increasing public knowledge and engagement but also as an aid to research in Conservation and Biodiversity.

  • The best interactive tree of life ever!

  • This will revolutionize how we teach and understand the Tree of Life. It is an invaluable tool for communicating the grand scope of life's history.

  • I showed OneZoom to my colleagues as - honestly - the most impressive visualization of scientific results I have ever come across.

  • It’s hard to overstate how clever it is at solving a basic limitation in our capacity to communicate large and complicated trees.

  • Just to say how very much impressed — floored, even — I am with the OneZoom tool. I'd wanted to see something as simple to use as this since at least 1998.

• Lecturers and professors

  • I often use OneZoom in my class, the students love it.

  • Turned overwhelming "boring" text into the 'aha' moment when students can see the connections.

  • I teach the evolution parts of a huge (>300 students) first year general biology module, and some of the students initially think of evolution only in linear, “March of Progress” terms. OneZoom is a great tool to correct that misapprehension!

  • I've been using onezoom for 3 years now as a teaching tool.... Students are tasked to explore the Tree of Life using onezoom to determine the evolutionary relationship among taxa. They love it (and I do too!)!

  • I am full of admiration for your article about communicating the Tree of Life. It is wonderful work you are doing.

• User quotes

  • OneZoom really helps get my mind around the complexities of the tree of life.

  • I have been telling people about how incredible OneZoom is all week!

  • To have all this information so readily available is a wondrous achievement that one might have imagined would only ever exist in the realms of science fiction. It is such an engrossing display I consult it daily.

  • A friend of mine just sent me your paper about OneZoom, and now I'm so excited I can't concentrate on anything else … Your idea of using fractal trees to do that is so revolutionary, and at the same time so obvious!

  • It's a mind-blowing project — I tend to see humans as one of many species of mammal, but the tree reminded me how much life there is beyond mammals, and indeed beyond vertebrates. It reignited my awe of evolution from undergraduate days 30 years ago.

  • I have learnt so much browsing OneZoom and am ever grateful for this resource. It has been great seeing it "evolve" over the years, especially last year's large update. Many thanks for this way of accessing knowledge and keep up the excellent work!

  • I can appreciate the value of this project to scientists and students and I have spent hours exploring the tree just for curiosity.

  • I am very impressed by the OneZoom project as a first-of-its-kind learning tool with tremendous potential … This is truly an incredible program that democratizes knowledge and makes it immediately tangible in a way that only years of study might have done in the past … I hope to see this project evolve and become as standard a tool of knowledge and education as Wikipedia is now.

  • I really love how they embrace the idea that the web is not made of electronic paper, and stuff like this lets us explore science in ways that we never could in books.

  • Definitely one of the most interesting websites I’ve come across and I have spent hours exploring it, and have learned that a lot of what I understood about evolution was incorrect! It’s also a great interface in terms of ease-of-use and it’s tree design.

  • I really appreciate OneZoom and have been able to think more about our relation to other species with it.

• Professionals

  • Your tree is the best thing to ever happen to evolutionary education. Keep up the amazing work.

  • I love the OneZoom tool - really easy to use and the visualization is great. I've just shared it with my 13 year old, who is a science geek - he loved it and is still playing with it!

  • I wanted to congratulate the OneZoom team on the amazing interface and reference resource that is OneZoom. Amazing job!

  • OneZoom is one of the most fascinating visualization projects I've seen in years​!

  • A Revolutionary Look at the Tree of Life… Charles Darwin would be proud.

  • The fractal tree of life is one of the greatest inventions I have ever come across... If there was a single justification needed for technology, to show a competence not afforded by traditional media, here it is.

  • This seems to me like the perfect synthesis of new media.

  • Your OneZoom website is the best visualization of data on the web, bar none… Years ago, attending a talk by Stephen Jay Gould, I asked Gould what the shape of a tree of life should be, what would it look like, and his answer wasn't satisfactory to me. I've thought about this problem for years, which is essentially a big data problem as well as one of finding the right visual concept. But you've done it. With fractals, of course! And my first thought was, why didn't I think of that?

  • Your project is a beautiful one and we are happy to support it



• Students

  • OneZoom is probably my favorite website of all time.

  • …simply the most useful tool for understanding phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships.

  • Thanks for an excellent application. The content is most interesting as well as appealing and the design is very good. A minor part of the tree now serves as the cover of my thesis Travelling through time: Students’ interpretation of evolutionary time in dynamic visualizations and has gained much appreciation. Thank you very much for your valuable contribution.

  • I LOVE your phylogenetic trees! I am an undergrad at Middlebury College, and my professor just referred us to them. Now not only am I using your tool, but I'm also writing a paper about it.

  • OneZoom has been incredibly helpful throughout my first year course: biology of organisms … [OneZoom] gives you a complete picture of the tree of life that imprints in your memory … I don’t know how to explain the greatness of it … thank you for such a great invention

  • I have been enjoying your website! It is a really helpful tool.

  • The OneZoom project is awesome!

• Educators

  • In my opinion, it is the best visualisation of evolution that's out there for the lay person.

  • Wonderful idea and resource!

  • The OneZoom tree is a fantastic teaching tool for high schools. Students can use it as a resource for many activities in biology classes from evolution to classification. They love the zooming capabilities of the site and really enjoyed the links to Wikipedia pages for more information. I can almost hear the gasps of amazement when images become part of the tree. Thanks for a great tool.

  • I read about OneZoom in Science Magazine - TERRIFIC PROJECT!! Thank you. This is something that middle-school and high-school science classes should see and use regularly.

  • I teach evolution and fractals, and thanks to @OneZoomTree this just got much cooler!

  • This is a beautiful and amazing resource.

  • OneZoom - fractal explorer for the tree of life: 18,000+ views on #PLOSBiology Teaching Bio101 will never be the same

  • Whether I'm teaching A-level, undergraduates or Year 1s I always have OneZoom open in the background ready to show them how living things are connected. Every moment my students spend exploring OneZoom is time well spent and each of those moments expands to dozens of questions over the course of the next few months. This should be in every classroom.

  • My intention is to make onezoom part of every biology lesson where possible.

• Selected tweets

  • Genius visualisation project mapping the entire tree of life into a single explorable diagram.

  • One of the coolest things I've seen on the internet

  • I'm addicted already, and happily browsing 1.8 million species.

  • Gosh that's a bit beautiful

  • There goes the afternoon

  • Is an educational time-waster possible? OneZoom

  • We are just one tiny leaf on the tree of life. Watch 160 million years of mammal evolution.

  • OneZoom Tree of Life - be amazed and RT to every biologist you know

  • A beautiful organization of genetic relatedness in this new program - organized the way we think, not the way we read

  • Tree of Life redesign with OneZoom, a Google Maps like approach to phylogenetic trees

  • Just discovered @OneZoomTree ! Such a cool and easy way to explore the tree of life. Check it out and find your species OneZoom.org

  • This site is so awesome, I'm just gonna spend the rest of my day zoomin' and clickin' away here.

  • @OneZoom this looks amazing! a fantastic resource with so much potential

  • The Google Maps of Evolutionary Biology: OneZoom

  • Oh lord…amazing evolution-geek diversion. The growth animation is particularly pleasing to watch.

  • Warning to #science lovers - productivity loss ahead

  • We've also used @OneZoomTree for a herpetology class. Lots of activities you can do with it and it inherently reinforces some phylogenetic concepts.