Excited to announce pylifemap – interactive visualization of taxon-associated data!

Hello everyone,

I’m thrilled to share that our tool pylifemap is now ready to use!

Why pylifemap?

Visualizing data associated with NCBI Taxonomy Identifiers (taxids) is increasingly important across fields like comparative genomics, metagenomics, metabarcoding, and even for outreach. Yet, until now, no tool allowed mapping your data while keeping the full context of the taxonomic tree—risking biased interpretations.

What pylifemap does

pylifemap is a Python package that lets you superimpose your own data directly on the interactive Lifemap Tree of Life explorer. With a simple syntax, you can add multiple layers such as points, lines, icons, heatmaps, or any custom annotations. The result: fully interactive visualizations to explore your datasets, shareable as notebooks, standalone HTML files, or exportable as static images.

Get started

• Install via pip: pip install pylifemap
• Development version: GitHub
• Documentation and interactive examples: pylifemap docs
• Gallery to get inspiration from: pylifemap gallery

We’re excited to hear feedback, see your visualizations, and collaborate with the community to explore new ways of interacting with taxonomic data!

Illustrations

• IUCN categories with pylifemap (pylifemap can summarize information at internal nodes of the taxonomy). Live example here.

• Exploration of a metagenomics dataset (Kraken2 output, environmental samples from Wuhan Market in China). Live example here.