ART AND SCIENCE UNITE
FOR BIODIVERSITY

Discover how you are connected to all life with which we share our planet, and be
inspired by ways you can help protect life on Earth. The project celebrates Earth’s
rich diversity of animals, plants and other organisms represented by the Tree of
Life, whose branches connect all living things.

2345

THE NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS TO ONE TREE, ONE PLANET

SEE OUR COLLECTIVE IMPACT ADD UP

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ONE TREE, ONE PLANET, CONNECTING ART AND SCIENCE

The ONE TREE, ONE PLANET artwork celebrates Earth’s rich diversity of animals, plants and other organisms represented by the Tree of Life, the immense network of relationships that links all living things. The message of the series is simple: We’re all related.

Everyone can participate! In the application, In the application, with your portrait and your heartbeat, you’ll represent Homo sapiens inside the Tree of Life. You’ll be connected with another species based on your heart rate, then you’ll be connected with another species. For each species, you’ll understand how we are related with all life on earth. After that first experience, you’ll be invited to take challenges to reduce your impact on biodiversity. ONE TREE, ONE PLANET makes it fun, easy and rewarding for everyone to reduce our collective impact.

The application also gives access to an interactive tree of life explorer based on OneZoom, allowing you to explore the evolutionary connections between more than 2 million species.

During live projections the application will also give you the opportunity to interact with the artwork and have your portrait projected on buildings and monuments, truly becoming part of the art.

The melody of the elegant music in artist Naziha Mestaoui’s One Tree, One Planet projection is billions of years old and inside each of us. The music is made based on the DNA sequence that we share with every living organism on Earth.

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TEAM

A collaboration between art and science by artist Naziha Mestaoui, and scientists Douglas Soltis, Pamela Soltis, Robert Guralnick, Matt Gitzendanner, Yan Wong and James Rosindell.

In partnership with OneZoom, a UK charitable incorporated organisation (non-profit)

Naziha Mestaoui

Renowned Belgian artist and architect Naziha Mestaoui passed away on April 29, 2020. Naziha was a pioneer of digital art work; she created immersive and sensory experiences by blending space, imagery and technology. Her notable environmental art work includes 1Heart 1Tree and One Tree One Planet.

Her interactive multimedia exhibits question Western culture’s disconnection with the environment and re-center nature at the heart of cultural issues. Through her art, she invites us to use technologies to reconnect with nature, creating a dynamic that can inspire our future.

One of her most recognized projects “1 Heart 1 Tree” debuted at the United Nations Climate Conference in December 2015. Mestaoui produced grand-scale “forests of light” through interactive projections of trees that spanned on the Eiffel Tower.

Mestaoui’s work has been exhibited around the globe, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Photography in Tokyo, the Contemporary Art Biennale in Sevilla, Miami Art Basel and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai.

Naziha was the inspiration behind the art work of One Tree One Planet. The rest of the One Tree One Planet team remain dedicated to inspiring others by continuing One Tree One Planet in memory of Naziha.

Douglas E. Soltis

Douglas Soltis is a Distinguished Professor in the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics, (Soltis lab.) Florida Museum of Natural History and Department of Biology at the University of Florida. His research interests are in plant evolution and phylogeny, an area in which he has published extensively together with his wife Pamela Soltis and together they were the joint awardees of the 2006 Asa Gray Award. They are the principal investigators in the Soltis laboratory, where they both hold the rank of Distinguished Professor and are contributing authors of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group. In 2017, Dr. Soltis was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Pamela Soltis

Pamela Soltis is an American botanist.

She is a distinguished professor at the University of Florida and principal investigator of the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics and Evolutionary Genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1986. Dr. Soltis research interests are angiosperm phylogeny, phylogeography, polyploidy, and conservation genetics. Among her most cited contributions are papers on the role of genetic and genomic attributes in the success of polyploids. In 2016, Dr. Soltis was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Soltis was President of the Botanical Society of America 2007-08.

Robert Guralnick

Rob Guralnick is a biodiversity scientist who takes an integrative approach to global change biology. Although interested in theory and practice of the discipline, his work is also geared towards the mobilization and (re)-use of biodiversity records already collected such as biocollections records and data from the literature. He is a Curator of Biodiversity Informatics.

Matt Gitzendanner

Matt Gitzendanner is a Scientist at the University of Florida. He has considerable computational expertise in dealing with big data and building large trees of relationship.

About the OneZoom tree of life explorer

OneZoom is a UK charitable incorporated organisation (non-profit), which aims to provide easy access to scientific knowledge about evolution, biodiversity and conservation. A major part of its work is to maintain a scientifically accurate, educational and visually appealing record of the tree of life that is easily accessible to the public [www.onezoom.org/life.html]. OneZoom provides the tree of life explorer engine for One Tree, One Planet. Key people from the OneZoom organisation include two of its founding trustees who directly worked with the One Tree, One Planet Team: James Rosindell (also a research fellow/lecturer in biodiversity theory and science outreach at Imperial College London), and Yan Wong (formerly a professional science communicator and now a researcher on computational techniques for handling large genetic datasets at the Big Data Institute in Oxford).

DNA Music by Naziha Mestaoui and Stefan Haeri

Software development by NOXAKA – Leila Aït Kaci

App development by UCAYA

For questions or support, please e-mail: support@onetreeoneplanet.org

Tree of Life explorer software built using the OneZoom codebase with developments specific to ONE TREE, ONE PLANET by Jamie Lentin. See www.onezoom.org/about and for further acknowledgements related to the tree of life explorer, and www.onezoom.org/data_sources for detailed data sources)