All Plant Families Phylogenic Tree Project!

Pictures!
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I made a family tree for every single Plant Family!
Techically every spermatophyte (Seed bearing) plant family, not including ferns, moss & things like that.
This tree goes to Subfamily level for every plant family and Tribe/Subtribe level on 87 expanded plant families (Those with important fruit crop species)

Now you everyone gets to see who their favorite plants/crops are closely related to genetically.

Here’s a compress png version of the project.

image
image761×4096 180 KB

Here’s a uncompressed pdf file of the tree.
ALL DONE V4 Spermatophyte Subfamilies Tribes Workstation.pdf (2.2 MB)

Is there anyway I can improve this tree?
Any thoughts? It’s what I’ve been working on for 3-4ish months (+ ~1 year of research).

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This is beautiful. It’s so nice to be able to see everything laid out together.

Taxonomy is so great. It’s such a weird rabbit hole that you can just keep going further and further down. It’s like, you think you know all you need to about it and then suddenly you see BOOM, yams are monocots :exploding_head: (how???) and then you have to reevaluate everything you thought you knew.

I also didn’t realize schisandra was so closely related to illicium. Also, the utter chaos of the magnoliids is wild. Like, you have cinnamomum and canellaceae and you’d think they’re both cinnamon, but they’re not even in the same order. It’s madness, I love it.

Now do ferns :speak_no_evil:

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Thank you! Anyway I could improve it?
I was thinking of getting it in print as a big beautiful poster.

Hahha yup :sweat_smile: :smile:.
Then there’s that one Eudicot that has 3 flower petals, Hot Mermaid (Floerkea proserpinacoides).

Also Bannanas grow like Ginger, it makes so much sense that they are both part of the Zingiberales order.

Craziest part is Horizontal Gene Flow, especially the phylogenic position of Parasitic plants shifting the placement of families.
Since Phylogenic Trees basically anazlize plant DNA, it gets confusing if DNA can be transferred from plants horizontally without sexual reproduction (flowers, seed, pollen, ect).

Another part is Whole Genome Duplication events, where chromosome doubles & creates new tribes/subtribes/genea & sometimes whole new families too.

:sweat_smile: :smile: yup, lots of plants mimic each other under similar enviromental selection pressures.
Another crazy concept is the selection pressure of Human Plant Breeding, everything we touch gets tastier, sweeter, yielding more, easier to harvest, ect. So many traits like these show evidence of domestication, makes me think some wild populations of Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) are surving offspring of cultivars bred by Native Americans.

But to bring it back to cinnamon, also people like to use the same common name for totally unrelated plants, sometimes for reasons that make sense & sometimes for reasons that make no sense at all.

A classic example is not confusing Black Pepper type Peppercorns (Piper spp.) with Capsicum type Peppers.

:grimacing: :sweat_smile: oh boy… that might get a bit too complex! Maybe for another time.

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I don’t think so, other than it being larger!

Wow, I didn’t even realize that was a thing. It makes sense but also is totally crazy, haha.

Honestly, I’d be surprised if all wild pawpaw populations weren’t either partially or entirely descended from those bred by Native Americans.

Tell me about it. I work with wild edible plants and whenever I use eastern hemlock for something someone goes “but…but…Socrates…” To make things worse, the local name for yew is ground hemlock :expressionless:. So I’m left going “No, this hemlock won’t poison you, this other one will. And also this one, which is really carrots.”

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Indeed! Nature is beautiful and crazy at the same time!
I do hope to exploit this horizontal gene flow effect to breed better crops & facilitate hybrids between genera & other wide crosses.

:sweat_smile: yup, that’s why Im calling Pinaceae Hemlocks, Tsuga, we make the scientific name the common name from now on to avoid confusion.

Does anyone actually know why we call them both Hemlocks? One is a conifer tree, the other poisonous carrot relative? How could they possibly be both a hemlock? Seriously what even is a hemlock?

Another bad example is Jerusalem Artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus), It’s not an Artichoke nor is it from Jerusalem. Some people also call it sunchoke which makes it sound like a crop to choke yourself on, not appetizing.
Hence if Sunflower can be named after the flowers of Helianthus, then the tuber root crop version of Helianthus should rightfully be called Sunroot.

Sometimes the Common Name is longer & more confusing that the Scientific name.
Take Chokeberries (Aronia spp.) for example, Aronia so much better than a berry you choke on (Which get needlessly confused for Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana).

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Rewrite it as relationship .
Write some code to generate the actual image from relationship.
Tweaking the parameters until it look nice.

Taxonomy is ever changing.
Fixed static picture can’t kero up with change.
Dynamic graphics suit most for this applications.

Covid 19 virolgist make something like that.
And they can update it every week to keep up with the virus.

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hmm… maybe something with html?

Indeed! Especially so at the species & genus level.