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（四足动物）包括我们自己的物种，代表着与人类日常生活相交的伟大而多样的进化辐射之一。四足动物——鸟类、哺乳动物、两栖动物和爬行动物——总共有大约33000种，包括从水生、地下、树栖到空中的生命史，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。四足动物在提供多种生态功能方面发挥着重要作用，对生物多样性监测具有重要意义。然而，在进化关系、生态重要特征的分布和物种分布方面，仍存在显著的知识空白。该项目将进行协调一致的收集工作，使关键的进化和生态属性接近物种水平的完整性，从而为宏观进化、宏观生态学、比较生物学和全球变化研究建立一个全球模式系统。收集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。大规模平行测序方法将用于收集目前缺乏此类数据的约4,000种新的多位点遗传信息。这些数据将用于得出一个包含所有四足动物物种的后验树集，并捕获剩余的不确定性。后验树集将用于计算进化独特性和各种树指标。与主要合作者一起，研究人员将为数十个变量编译形态，生态和生活史特征数据，并从系统发育imputation中获益，以预测缺失值。现有的生命地图基础设施中的一个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大范围生态位特征，以及对不确定性的估计。进一步的整合将把这些产品与在线系统发育可视化工具连接起来，允许基于地图和树的发现和下载。最后，该项目将通过举例生物地理、保护和比较分析来展示综合层的效用，这些分析将突出推断和预测保护利用方面的进展，这些进展来自于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.