Figure 2

Topology edit distance. This shows an example of how the edit distance is found for different topologies on the same number of species (in this case 5 different lineages). Each move allows the splitting or joining of a pair of lineages. The score is then used to find the similarity between tree topologies taking into account the number of species being compared. This example compares the tree topologies: ((1,3),(2,4,5)) and ((1,2),(5,(3,4))). The score here is 5.