AquaPony: interactive visualization of phylogeographic scenarios

AquaPony is a web application designed to explore and interpret evolutionary scenarios on annotated phylogenetic trees (for example, ancestral geographic states). It was built to make uncertainty in ancestral reconstructions easier to understand and communicate.

Why AquaPony?

In phylogeography, several scenarios can be nearly as plausible as the best one. AquaPony helps users go beyond a single “best” reconstruction by interactively examining alternative scenarios under user-defined uncertainty thresholds.

Key features

Interactive visualization of the full tree and selected subtrees.
Explicit display of uncertainty in ancestral state assignments.
Exploration of alternative phylogeographic scenarios along branches.
Instant visual updates, including for large trees.
Export-ready figures for reports and publications.

Use cases

AquaPony is relevant to infectious disease research, ecology, agronomy, and more broadly to any study involving spatiotemporal evolutionary inference from annotated phylogenies.

Access the tool

Open AquaPony here: https://website.atgc-montpellier.fr/aquapony/aquapony.html

Scientific reference

Cazaux B., Castel G., Rivals E. (2019). AQUAPONY: visualization and interpretation of phylogeographic information on phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics, 35(17), 3163–3165. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btz011

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