The Universe of Fungi - A Taxonomy Snapshot
We are interested in fungi so we decided to investigate! This then became a poster project. It had to be so big 70x100 cm (28x40 inches) to be able to encompass even a small part of the vast realm. Afterwards we decided to reverse-engineer it and put it on the internet, we do not recommend this approach hehe, broke a lot of brain to adapt it to flexible screen formats.
About the fungi viz
The fungi life cycle makes them technically immortal. Ancient organisms have been found. When people regularly find new species, they classify them based on evolution. Fungi were previously thought more closely related to plants than animals. Today we know they are more similar to animals.
Recently, whole-genome sequencing paved the way for an entirely new picture of how fungi evolved, many branches were moved and created. How do you even categorise evolution? Of course, there are heaps of branches before, beside and inside fungi.
This visualization zooms in on a small part of the fungi evolution. It drills down to the class level for the overall visualization with 75 classes. We chose the examples above with at least one from each subkingdom in mind. We also named it a "Taxonomy Snapshot" because of the fast pace of discovery.
The overall taxonomy is based on: Tedersoo, L., Sánchez-Ramírez, S., Kõljalg, U. et al. High-level classification of the Fungi and a tool for evolutionary ecological analyses. Fungal Diversity 90, 135-159 (2018) which is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
