Following its launch in the Fall of 2020, Zoonomia — a collaborative effort led by the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT and Lindblad-Toh Lab, SciLifeLab at Uppsala University to catalog the genomic sequence and assemblies of over 240 mammalian species on Earth — began receiving attention for how it presented the data and information collected from its field studies.
The project’s goals are to provide a free database of information on mammalian data, pinpointing specialized traits across species that endure time, so that researchers from around the world can access the data and utilize it in their own research to further develop understandings of all mammals (humans included). Most recently, researchers at the University of California, Davis, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and several other research organizations unveiled a new study using the data from Zoonomia to analyze what other mammals are at potential risk to SARS-CoV-2 otherwise known as COVID-19.
Rather than simply acting as a source to download data that is unreadable to the human eye, 360DESIGN sought to create a platform that would appeal to the academic community and the general public alike, so that even the mildly curious passerby might be able to learn a bit more about their fellow mammal.
The Zoonomia Project website was nominated for a people’s choice Webby Award in the science category next to NASA and IBM, and was then selected by jury to be a featured project in their ‘Crafted by Code’ showcase. The showcase focuses on the design and coding process behind the website. At its heart is the Mammalian Tree, an interactive tree of life that users can explore through click and zoom events that show each mammal in the database, their conservation status, imagery, descriptions, and links to the genomic sequences available to them for download. The feature for Crafted by Code will be up for a year, featuring an interview video from some of the creatives at 360DESIGN.