Overlaying a tree on an LTT plot

I'm just in the middle of fixing a bug in the phytools function for lineage-through-time plots, ltt, pointed out to me by Luke Harmon. It has to do with node labels & is not that interesting (but I will nonetheless post the fixed version soon). However, in the process of playing around with that function, a discovered a find of neat visualization that involves overlaying a phylogeny on an LTT plot.

Here is a demo:

library(phytools)
## simulate tree
tree<-pbtree(n=26,scale=10) ## arbitrary

The next part uses a function to automatically generate from a starting color a color with a certain alpha level of transparency. This function was posted to R-sig-phylo by Josef Uyeda:

makeTransparent<-function(someColor,alpha=10){
    newColor<-col2rgb(someColor)
    apply(newColor,2,function(curcoldata){
    rgb(red=curcoldata[1],green=curcoldata[2],blue=curcoldata[3],
        alpha=alpha,maxColorValue=255)
    })
}

Now we're ready to create our visualization:

obj<-ltt(tree)
plotTree(tree,color=makeTransparent("blue",alpha=50),ftype="off",add=TRUE,
    mar=par()$mar)

We might even add other features - like vertical lines so we can see where lineages that have accumulated appear. This works well particularly for small trees:

tree<-pbtree(n=15,scale=10)
obj<-ltt(tree)
for(i in 3:(length(obj$ltt)-1)) 
    lines(rep(obj$times[i],2),par()$usr[3:4],lty="dashed",
    col=makeTransparent("black",alpha=50))
plotTree(tree,color=makeTransparent("blue",alpha=50),ftype="off",add=TRUE,
    mar=par()$mar)

That's all.