dynamic depth for tree browsing...

[mtholder]

I know that (because of the number of nodes) we can't fetch the tree deeper than a few levels. But it does make it hard to navigate. It would be nice to have a tree-of-life API method that returns a deeper tree if the tree (a few levels tipward) is not larger than some number X nodes.
This might need to be a pair of treemachine and opentree/webapp issues.

[arlin]

is there some way to leverage species or taxon popularity to solve this problem (we're working with OneZoom to design a popularity service)? That is, each taxon or species can be assigned a popularity based on sequences in GenBank or wikispecies hits or whatever. > 99.99% of the 2M taxa in OT are unfamiliar to the typical user. Users (other than experts on a particular taxon) rely on familiar taxa to serve as landmarks-- it's how they make sense of the tree.