ATOL: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Early bird: A Collaborative Project to Resolve the Deep Nodes of Avian Phylogeny

早鸟计划是美国五个机构之间的大规模合作，一个在苏格兰，两个在澳大利亚，以确定所有主要鸟类群体之间的进化关系。该项目将使这些关系为研究界和公众所知，并有可能使用这些关系作为一个比较框架，组织和理解大量的信息已经在鸟类生态学，进化，生理学和行为。 该项目将从一系列精心挑选的基因中产生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。证据的广泛分析将与快速扩展的计算工具套件进行，可用于推断关系，分歧时间和进化模式。 这些数据将通过一个在线数据库提供给其他研究人员，该数据库配有分析和导出工具，并通过一个网站提供给公众，该网站提供关于进化关系重要性的背景信息、项目进展报告以及感兴趣的人可以自己探索数据的互动教育工具。这是对鸟类关系“家谱”的全面和可靠的估计，并有助于使用该家谱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突出和最迷人的生物之一。 它们一直是大量和多样性科学研究的主题，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的地位很高，加上它们的巨大流动性，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的优先事项。它们的飞行能力、身体美和迷人的行为让我们感到惊讶和鼓舞，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活动。 所有这些人类与鸟类的互动将通过更好地了解鸟类的进化历史和遗传多样性而丰富，Early Bird将提供。

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.