Approximately 470 million years ago, the first plants to inhabit land arose from green algae. Subsequently, these plants diversified to form the foundation of all terrestrial ecosystems. As part of a collaboration with the 1KP project (a multidisciplinary consortium of plant biologists and bioinformaticians led by researchers at the University of Alberta and Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, Hong Kong), we developed methods to process large amounts of DNA sequence data to better understand the origin and evolution of early land plants. In 2014, we used these data and methods to shift our view of how early land plants are related to each other and to groups of plants that have a more recent origin. We are now expanding this research to understand the role in plant diversification played by genes transferred directly from fungi to early land plant genomes (Wickett, Johnson, and outside collaborators).