As part of my mantra that it's not about the data, it's all about the links between the data, I've started exploring matching GenBank sequences to GBIF occurrences using the specimen_voucher codes recorded in GenBank sequences. It's quickly becoming apparent that this is not going to be easy.

One thing which has always frustrated me about geophylogenies is how tedious they are to create. In theory, they should be pretty straightforward to generate. We take a tree, get point localities for each leaf in the tree, and generate the KML to display on Google Earth. The tedious part is getting the latitude and longitude data in the right format, and linking the leaves in the tree to the locality data.

The latest version of the David and Wayne Maddison's Cartographer module for their program Mesquite can export KML files for Google Earth. They graciously acknowledge my crude efforts in this direction, and Bill Piel's work -- he really started this whole thing rolling. So, those of you inspired to try your hand at Google Earth trees, and who were frustrated by the lack of tools should grab a copy of Mesquite and take it for a spin.