Plant Tree of Life
Discovering and disseminating the evolutionary history of all plant genera.
Plant Tree of LifeTree of Life
Building a complete tree of life for both plants and fungi at the genus level
Expanding and populating the tree of life for plants and fungi
The tree of life is the fundamental biological roadmap for navigating the evolution and properties of life on Earth.
This Initiative will build on the successes of the Plant and Fungal Trees of Life (PAFTOL) project to deliver a further step change in our knowledge.
It will equip us with the tools to accelerate efforts to document, identify and classify plants and fungi, to explore their useful properties, to understand their origins and evolution, and to predict how species will respond to future environmental change.
Using Kew’s unrivalled collections and in collaboration with our partners around the world, we will complete the tree of life for both plants and fungi at the genus level. This will include all 14,000 angiosperm genera and 50 per cent of the 8,000 fungal genera.
Sequence data and the most up-to-date view of the tree of life will be made freely available online in Kew's Tree of Life Explorer.
Tree of Life projects
Related projects
The Tree of Life initiative is actively working with other projects and programmes that share our goals:
Initiative information
Updates
Publications and reports
All Tree of Life publications are listed in our Research Repository.
Kew's Tree of Life Explorer
Explore evolutionary trees of life and access the genomic data that underpin them in Kew's Tree of Life Explorer.
Data is currently available for flowering plants only. Research on fungi is underway and will be released in due course.