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，代表了与人类日常生活相交的巨大而多样的进化辐射之一。四足类动物-鸟类，哺乳动物，两栖动物和爬行动物-一起组成约。33，000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。四足动物在提供多样的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、重要生态特征的分布和物种分布方面仍存在重大的知识缺口。该项目将进行协调一致的集合努力，将产生接近物种水平的关键进化和生态属性的完整性，从而建立宏观进化，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排序提供重要的基础。在线分析和可视化工具将扩展成功的现有项目，并将直接用于其他分类群和其他生命谱系（GoLife）项目。大规模的平行测序方法将被用来收集新的多位点遗传信息的ca。目前有4,000个物种缺乏此类数据。这些数据将被用来推导出一个过时的后树集，包括所有四足动物物种，并捕捉剩余的不确定性。后验树集将用于计算进化独特性和各种树度量。与主要合作者一起，研究人员将为数十个变量编制形态，生态和生活史性状数据，并从系统发育插补中受益，以预测缺失值。纳入现有生命地图基础设施的一个新工具将把现有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大规模生态位特征以及不确定性估计。进一步的整合将把这些产品与在线遗传学可视化工具联系起来，以允许基于地图和树的发现和下载。最后，该项目将通过示例地理学、保护和比较分析来展示综合层的实用性，这些分析将突出推理和预测性保护使用的进展，这些预测性保护使用来自近乎完整和无偏见的全球数据。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.