This week I took the opportunity to explore a question I've been thinking about for my dissertation.  How do we visualize biodiversity? And how do these visualizations affect our conception of biodiversity?  I'm especially interested in ways we present a lot of species all at once (vs. a browsing database interface in which you would look at a series of individual species). One way that has become common to present lots of species all at once is the new circular supertree that scientists are turning too.  The mammal supertree is one example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/28_03_07_mammalstimeline_pdf.pdf.  There is a famous one for birds and a new one for plants too.  

I used this assignment as a chance to explore the software that scientists use to construct these phylogenies, the Interactive Tree of Life (http://itol.embl.de).  I made my own tree, centered around place rather than a specific evolutionary group of organisms.  I was able to make a tree with all the birds, plants, and moths of Palmyra atoll, a small island and ecological research station in the pacific. (More species to be added later perhaps). Below is a screenshot of the tree and the species names in Newick format for importing into the program.

 and the phylogeny bigger:

Although is a representation of all the species in a place, not the genetic relationship within a particular evolutionary group, the organization of the species in this place is still represented in terms of genetic relatedness.  I'd like the ability to toggle between types of relationships.  Some format where I could look at a place's species in terms of genetic relationships then look at them in a food web, also present abundance of individuals, then be able to click on each species and look at all the species that live on/in them.  Now that we know that each individual is also a habitat for microscopic organisms, I'd like a way to present the fractal nature of biodiversity.  

So, my question is: how do we visualize multiple types of relationships at once?  It seems like visualizations lock us into one kind of relationship at a time, how could we open up the visualization of biodiversity to multiple types of relationships at once?