Data access

The following guidelines explain how you gain access to our genomic data and trees, and the terms of use.

Kew Tree of Life Explorer data and trees (hereafter “the data”) are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which allows users to share and adapt the data, on condition of attribution and that no additional restrictions are applied. To attribute the data, please follow our citation guidelines and reference the appropriate data release number.

In many cases, the data have been released prior to publication in the academic literature, in accordance with the Toronto guidelines on pre-publication data sharing. Users may freely analyse released prepublication data, but should act responsibly by 1) respecting the scientific etiquette that allows data producers to publish the first global analyses of their data set, 2) accurately and completely citing the source of prepublication data, and 3) contacting the data producers to discuss publication plans in the case of overlap between planned analyses. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions about what you may do with the data.

Release Details

This site currently provides access to Kew Tree of Life Explorer release v3.0. Details of its contents can be found in the release notes.

Release 3.0 (April 2023) Phylogenomic data for 64 orders, 413 families, 8,336 genera and 10,377 species of angiosperms, across 10,699 sequenced angiosperm samples.

Details of previous releases can be found here.

Bulk downloads

The data (for current and historic releases) are available from the Kew Secure FTP (SFTP) site; see the README for a description of how the data are organised. The site can be accessed via most web browsers, or via a command line SFTP tool, as the user ‘anonymous’ (in some browsers, users may be prompted to login as a “guest”). If prompted for a password, simply type return. Links to specific data items on the SFTP site are provided from appropriate views in the website. Raw DNA sequence has been submitted to the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA); links are provided throughout the website, and a list of all ENA accession numbers associated with the project is provided as part of each SFTP release.