Entire areas of study, such as community phylogenetics and comparative analysis, require detailed phylogenetic, as well as ecological, information. This paper presents a solution to phylogeny assembly for ecologists to generate a phylogeny by searching species from an excellent genus-level reference phylogeny on the basis of taxonomy. The solution is based on the steps of parsing, reconstructing and storing of the basic phylogenetic tree; standardization of species sub-list; retrieving each node element in the chain; construction of group relation of node elements; calculation weight of each element; assembly of output phylogenetic tree and visualization of this phylogenetic tree in a web interactive environment. In embodiment of the solution, the phylogenetic tree for the genera of Chinese vascular plants is taken as the basic big tree and any name can be marked at the accepted name or synonym according to Flora of China (FOC). An online tool is being implemented at the URL: http://www.darwintree.cn/flora/index.shtml
['Zhen Meng', 'Jianhui Li', 'Zhiduan Chen']
A solution to phylogeny assembly for ecologists