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Donovan Parks (Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada)
Advances in sequencing technology have made georeferenced genomic and metagenomic data sets increasingly common which has revolutionized our ability to investigate the processes influencing biodiversity. GenGIS is a free and open-source software package that allows users to merge genetic, ecological, and digital map data into a highly interactive graphical environment where the interplay between these distinct sources of data can be visualized, explored, and quantitatively assessed. Specific attention has been given to the visualization of 2D and 3D tree structures (i.e., phylogenies or hierarchical clusterings) within their associated geographic context in order to study the influence of geography and ecological gradients on biodiversity. The included image depicts a hierarchical clustering of marine bacterial metagenomes and shows the extent to which their similarity can be explained by a latitudinal cline. GenGIS has been used to explore a number of data sets including microbial metagenomes, the viral genomes from the recent H1N1 pandemic and eukaryotic phylogenies including a human mitochondrial DNA data set.