From the PSB Special Issue on Art in the Botanical Sciences
Filling Out PhyloPic: Call for Adoption by Plant Scientists
subspecies). To further improve the utility of PhyloPic and promote increased use across the plant sciences, we showcase fast and efficient methods for creating suitable silhouettes from multiple image sources including photographs, illustrations, and herbarium specimens. These methods will help increase adoption and quality of submitted images and complements the recent release of PhyloPic 2.0, which features faster performance, an improved user interface, and automatic conversion of submissions to infinitely scalable vector files.
Mason C. McNair1, 3 T. Michael Keesey2 Clemson University, Pee Dee Research & Education Center, 2200 Pocket Rd, Florence, SC 29506 2 PhyloPic, 22171/2 Addison Way, Los Angeles, CA 90041 3 Author for correspondence: mcnair5@clemson.edu 1
KEYWORDS creative commons, figure creation, open access, PhyloPic, scientific communication, silhouette images
ABSTRACT PhyloPic is a crowd-funded database of organism silhouette images that currently contains 8364 accepted submissions from 585 volunteers. Each silhouette image is associated with a taxonomic name via a network of phylogenetic nodes, enabling dynamic searches based on evolutionary relationships. The project has become an invaluable artistic resource for scientific publications, with more than 1900 references in published articles. Despite its success, adoption and contribution by plant scientists has been relatively low. Only ~8% of current submissions are for organisms within Archaeplastida (Plantae sensu lato), representing just ~0.066% of named terminal phylogenetic nodes (i.e., species or
Creating impactful figures to effectively communicate science is challenging. Many scientists aspire to create educational and inspiring figures but struggle due to a lack of artistic skills or limited access to high-quality graphics. These barriers can be eased through expansion of the PhyloPic platform. PhyloPic is an open database of free silhouette images of organisms. Each silhouette is associated with taxonomic names via a curated phylogeny drawn from a variety of sources, primarily The Open Tree of Life (OpenTreeofLife et al., 2019) and The Paleobiology Database (McClennen et al., 2017). This enables dynamic searches based
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