Executive Director Phoenix Bioinformatics Newark, California
Body of Abstract: MorphoBank is a web application with tools and archives for evolutionary research in phylogenetics, specifically systematics and cladistics. Study of phenotypes, which is often visually-based, is central to contemporary systematics and taxonomic research. MorphoBank provides much needed tools for the expansion and modernization of phylogenetic work on phenotypes for scientists who are collecting phenotypic (morphological) data to build phylogenetic trees. As a digital archive of data, MorphoBank helps scientists make their data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) by facilitating open sharing of observations published by today's scientists. Moreover, the data sets in MorphoBank can include scientific observations as both phylogenetic matrices and images (2D and 3D), thereby supporting our understanding of the morphological (e.g., anatomical) basis for the evolutionary relationships among species within the Tree of Life. MorphoBank projects range in extinct and extant taxonomic representation, for example, projects include 3D models of Cretaceous fossil angiosperms (Project 3218) and morphological characters for inflorescence in Santalales (Project 3212). MorphoBank's unique web application allows teams of scientists at different institutions to collaborate in real time to build, publish and permanently host morphological phylogenetic matrices, a key data type in these research fields. MorphoBank's staff curates the submitted data to maximize its reusability by other researchers. Unlike generalized data repositories, MorphoBank's database is specialized and structured to build, curate and permanently house phylogenetic matrices derived from the study of phenotypes.