Many flexible parameterizations exist to represent data on the sphere. In addition to the venerable spherical harmonics, we have the Slepian basis, harmonic splines, wavelets and wavelet-like Slepian frames. In this paper we focus on the latter two: spherical wavelets developed for geophysical applications on the cubed sphere, and the Slepian "tree", a new construction that combines a quadratic concentration measure with wavelet-like multiresolution. We discuss the basic features of these mathematical tools, and illustrate their applicability in parameterizing large-scale global geophysical (inverse) problems. © 2011 Copyright Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).