Collaborative Research: VertLife Terrestrial: A complete, global assembly of phylogenetic, trait, spatial and environment characteristics for a model clade

陆生脊椎动物(四足类)包括我们自己的物种，代表着与人类日常生活相交的巨大和多样化的进化辐射之一。这四个四足类--鸟类、哺乳动物、两栖动物和爬行动物--总共包括约3.3万个物种，包括从水生、地下、树栖到空中的生活史，涵盖了各种营养策略，并拥有一些最令人惊叹的生态适应能力。四足动物在提供各种生态功能方面发挥着重要作用，它们对生物多样性监测工作至关重要。然而，在进化关系、重要生态性状的分布和物种的分布方面，仍然存在显著的知识差距。该项目将开展协调一致的工作，使关键的进化和生态属性接近物种一级的完整性，从而建立一个宏观进化、宏观生态学、比较生物学和全球变化研究的全球模型系统。汇编的特征和空间数据将为严格的保护监测和优先次序提供至关重要的支柱。在线分析和可视化工具将扩展成功的现有项目，并将被构建为可直接用于其他分类群和其他生命系谱(GoLife)项目。大规模并行测序方法将被用于收集目前缺乏此类数据的约4000个物种的新的多基因座遗传信息。这些数据将被用来得出包括所有四足动物物种的后部树种的年代，并捕捉到剩余的不确定性。后验树集将被用来计算进化的区分度和各种树的度量。与主要合作者一起，研究人员将汇编数十个变量的形态、生态和生活史特征数据，并从系统发育归因中受益于预测缺失值。一个纳入现有生命地图基础设施的新工具将把现有的物种分布数据集与全球环境数据层联系起来，并提供所有脊椎动物的广泛生态位特征以及不确定性估计。进一步的集成将把这些产品链接到在线系统发育可视化工具，以允许基于地图和树的发现和下载。最后，该项目将通过实例生物地理、保护和比较分析来展示综合各层的效用，这些分析将突出近完整和无偏见的全球数据在推断和预测性保护使用方面的进展。该研究还将提供在线可视化和教程，围绕产品开发的博物馆展览，基于VertLife基础设施的研讨会，以及本科生和研究生的暑期实习。

Terrestrial vertebrates (Tetrapoda) include our own species and represent one of the great and diverse evolutionary radiations that intersect with humans' everyday lives. The four tetrapod classes - birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles - together comprise ca. 33,000 species, include life histories ranging from aquatic, subterranean, and arboreal to aerial, cover a variety of trophic strategies, and harbor some of the most stunning ecological adaptations. Tetrapods play a significant role in providing diverse ecological functions, and they are vital to biodiversity monitoring efforts. However, significant knowledge gaps remain in the evolutionary relationships, distributions of ecologically important traits, and distributions of species. The project will undertake concerted assembling efforts that will yield near species-level completeness of key evolutionary and ecological attributes thereby establishing a global model system for macroevolution, macroecology, comparative biology and global change research. The compiled trait and spatial data will provide a vital backbone for rigorous conservation monitoring and prioritization. The online analysis and visualization tools will extend successful, existing projects and will be built to be directly usable for other taxa and other Genealogy of Life (GoLife) projects. Massive parallel sequencing methods will be used to collect new multi-locus genetic information for ca. 4,000 species currently lacking such data. These data will be used to derive a dated posterior tree set that includes all tetrapod species and captures remaining uncertainty. The posterior tree set will be used to calculate evolutionary distinctness and a variety of tree metrics. Together with key collaborators the researchers will compile morphological, ecological and life history trait data for dozens of variables and additionally benefit from phylogenetic imputation to predict missing values. A new tool incorporated into the existing Map of Life infrastructure will link existing species distributional datasets to global environmental data layers and provide broad-scale niche characteristics for all vertebrates together with estimates of uncertainty. Further integration will link these products to online phylogeny visualization tools to allow map- and tree-based discovery and download. Finally, the project will demonstrate the utility of the integrated layers through example biogeographic, conservation and comparative analyses that will highlight the advance in inference and in predictive conservation use arising from near-complete and unbiased global data. The research will also provide online visualizations and tutorials, a museum exhibit developed around the products, a workshop based on VertLife infrastructure, and undergraduate and graduate summer internships.