Life Tree

Life Tree sub-project of the CDP Biodiversity Project developed by Mágoulo’s School for the Spiritually Gifted. Participants keep an individual Taxonomic Tree of organisms using the “King Phillip” structure. Organisms are added to the tree as at least a Genus — and, if possible — as a species as they are encountered by direct observation in nature or research in source material and described by the participant. This often requires adding branches to the tree in order to complete the classification. The project is gamified by keeping a leader board based on total number of branches and giving awards for greatest number of increase branches in a given time period.

Base Life Tree

The Life Tree is built in the Xmind software which has a free version. Each participant builds their Life Tree from this base version that includes taxa only at the Kingdom level, thus 8 banches/topics (7 Kingdoms and “Life (Biology)” Domain).

Building the Tree

Each organism a participant “describes” may be added to their tree. In most cases, this will involve classifying a species, but in some cases only a Genus is available due to difficulties identifying very similar species. In this case, the organism is entered as “Genus sp.”, for example, “Agelenopsis sp.” (Grass Spider).

Xmind calls each item a “topic” and the count of topics for the file is reported at the bottom of the main app window like “Topics: 1/8”. The second number is the total number of topics in the tree and the important statistic for the Life Tree leader board and awards.