ATOL: Collaborative Research: Early Bird: A Collaborative Project to Resolve the Deep Nodes of Avian Phylogeny

“早起鸟”项目是美国五家机构、苏格兰一家机构和澳大利亚两家机构的大规模合作项目，目的是确定所有主要鸟类群体之间的进化关系。该项目将使研究界和公众了解这些关系，并使利用这些关系作为比较框架成为可能，以此来组织和理解已经获得的关于鸟类生态学、进化、生理学和行为的大量信息。该项目将从一系列精心挑选的基因中生成所有主要鸟类谱系的大量DNA序列数据。这些数据将与现有的和新的形态学和化石数据相结合，以提供所有相关证据来解决这个问题。将利用可用于推断关系、分化时间和进化模式的快速扩展的计算工具套件，对证据进行广泛的分析。其他研究人员可以通过一个在线数据库访问这些数据，该数据库提供分析和导出工具，公众可以通过一个网站访问这些数据，该网站提供有关进化关系重要性的背景信息、项目进展报告，以及有兴趣的人可以自己探索这些数据的交互式教育工具。该项目的直接结果将是对鸟类关系的“家谱”提供一个详细、全面和可靠的估计，并促进利用这棵树来组织和解释有关鸟类的其他信息。这个项目对科学和社会的影响将是深远的。鸟类是世界上大多数生态系统中最重要和最迷人的生物之一。它们一直是数量惊人、种类繁多的科学研究的主题，这些研究在很大程度上影响了我们对自然世界和人类在其中的地位的理解。它们在许多食物链中处于高位，流动性强，这使它们成为环境质量的敏感指标，对鸟类种群的监测被广泛用于确定保护和管理重点。它们的飞行能力、身体美和迷人的行为让我们感到惊奇和鼓舞，鸟类为严肃的猎人和观鸟者以及每年数百万的后院观鸟者提供了大量的娱乐。所有这些人类与鸟类的互动都将通过更好地了解鸟类的进化史和遗传多样性而丰富，而“早起鸟”将提供这些知识。

Early Bird is a large-scale, cooperative effort among five institutions in the U.S., one in Scotland and two in Australia to determine the evolutionary relationships among all major groups of birds. The project will make these relationships known to the research community and the public, and make it possible to use these relationships as a comparative framework with which to organize and understand the vast amount of information already available on avian ecology, evolution, physiology, and behavior. The project will generate large amounts of DNA sequence data for all major avian lineages from a series of carefully selected genes. These data will be integrated with existing and new morphological and fossil data to bring all relevant evidence to bear on the problem. Extensive analysis of the evidence will be conducted with the rapidly expanding suite of computational tools available for the inference of relationships, divergence times, and evolutionary patterns. The data will be made accessible to other researchers in an online database with tools for analysis and export, and to the general public through a website with background information on the importance of evolutionary relationships, progress reports on the project, and interactive educational tools with which interested persons can explore the data themselves.The immediate results of this project will be to provide a detailed, comprehensive and robust estimate of the "family tree" of avian relationships, and to facilitate the use of that tree to organize and interpret other information about birds. The impact of this project on science and society will be far-reaching. Birds are among the most prominent and engaging creatures in most ecosystems worldwide. They have been the subject of an extraordinary number and diversity of scientific studies that figure largely in our understanding of the natural world and humanity's place in it. Their position high in many food chains together with their great mobility makes them sensitive indicators of environmental quality, and monitoring of bird populations is widely used to set conservation and management priorities. Their powers of flight, physical beauty, and captivating behaviors amaze and inspire us, and birds provide tremendous amounts of recreation for serious hunters and birders, as well as millions of backyard birdwatchers each year. All of these human interactions with birds will be enriched by a better understanding of avian evolutionary history and genetic diversity, which Early Bird will provide.