OneZoom is a UK charity dedicated to making the wonder of life on Earth accessible to everyone. Their mission is to advance public education in evolution, biodiversity, and conservation by creating an interactive, digital “tree of life” that anyone can explore.
Despite growing awareness of the biodiversity crisis, public understanding of life’s interconnectedness remains limited. The sheer scale and complexity of the evolutionary tree make it difficult to communicate effectively, particularly to non-specialist audiences.
This knowledge gap is particularly urgent in the context of rapid global biodiversity loss and climate change. Biodiversity underpins the stability of ecosystems, which in turn regulate our climate, purify our air and water, provide food security, and make many other contributions to people around the globe. Without widespread understanding of biodiversity, society risks underestimating its importance in tackling many global challenges.
But how can people protect something as elusive as biodiversity before it’s too late? While the geography of our planet is easily accessible through online maps, biodiversity remains largely unexplored and poorly communicated to the public – with most of it still unknown.
Traditional funding models in science tend to support low-risk, hypothesis-driven research, leaving innovative and higher-risk public engagement projects like OneZoom’s Tree of Life project without financial backing.
OneZoom's Tree of Life Explorer, initially conceived in 2011, allows people to see the diversity of species and their evolutionary relationships through a beautifully designed, fractal-based visualization. It provides an engaging and freely accessible way to understand our planet’s biodiversity and the urgent need to protect it.
The Tree of Life Explorer shows how all life on Earth is related. Viewers can explore the relationships between 2,228,991 species, including 105,498 images on a single zoomable page. Each leaf represents a different species, and the branches illustrate how these many species evolved from common ancestors over billions of years.
The Turner Kirk Trust are making an £18,000 donation to fund six weeks of professional software development to further develop the Tree of Life explorer. The work will take place in a number of short sprints, supported by further in-kind contributions from OneZoom volunteers. This will allow OneZoom to develop and test high-risk fractal algorithms and build the technical framework needed for the tool to work with the inclusion of evolutionary timescales and extinct species.
Link to the OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer.
As the OneZoom charity celebrates its first decade, the tree of life explorer has been seen by an estimated 3 million people online and has been used in displays and exhibitions by at least eleven museums and educational venues, attracting over 500,000 visitors per year.
Beyond educational settings, the project has been used for digital artwork by the artist Naziha Mestaoui and as cover art for a popular science book, “The Ancestor’s Tale” by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong. The visual design has also been used by jewellery manufacturers seeking to highlight the beauty and diversity of life on Earth.
The project is enabling educators, students, and the wider public to gain a deeper understanding of biodiversity and evolution. By making these complex concepts more accessible, the project is empowering millions with the knowledge to engage meaningfully with the subjects of evolution, biodiversity, and conservation.
With the Turner Kirk Trust’s support, OneZoom is breaking through its final technical and funding barriers to expand its impact at scale.
“We feel honoured to receive this generous support from the Turner-Kirk Trust. The funding will enable us to make an attempt at the last hurdle to providing a truly complete tree of life explorer - the inclusion of ancient extinct species and graphic illustration of the mind-boggling timescales of evolution alongside their fascinating relationships.”
In partnership with Darwin College of the University of Cambridge, the Turner Kirk Trust Darwin Business Plan project was established to support new entrepreneurial ideas that pilot collaborative solutions to global challenges.
In collaboration with Imperial College London, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and other partners, the research project set out to develop increased understanding of Antarctic krill distribution and its role in the Southern Ocean ecosystem.
In collaboration with The University of Glasgow, the project aims to develop the evidence needed to produce a transformative method for improving children’s ability across STEM subjects, independent of background or birth.
In partnership with Imperial College London, the Turner Kirk Trust Sprint Challenge was established to bring together conservation scientists and mathematicians from Imperial’s Centre for Environmental Policy, Department of Life Sciences, and Department of Mathematics.
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