Résumé
The visualization and interpretation of evolutionary spatiotemporal scenarios is broadly and increasingly used in infectious disease research, ecology, or agronomy. Using probabilistic frameworks, well-known tools can infer from molecular data ancestral traits for internal nodes in a phylogeny, and numerous phylogenetic rendering tools can display such evolutionary trees. However, visualizing such ancestral information and its uncertainty on the tree remains tedious. For instance, ancestral nodes can be associated to several geographical annotations with close probabilities and thus, several migration or transmission scenarios exist. We expose a webbased tool, named AquaPony, that facilitates such operations. Given an evolutionary tree with geographic annotations, the user can easily control the display of ancestral information on the entire tree or a subtree, and can view alternative phylogeographic scenarios along a branch according to a chosen uncertainty threshold. AquaPony interactively visualizes the tree and eases the objective interpretation of evolutionary scenarios. AquaPony’s implementation makes it highly responsive to user interaction, which instantaneously update the tree visualizations even for large trees (which can be exported as image files).