Collaborative Research: All Birds: A Time-scaled Avian Tree From Integrated Phylogenomic and Fossil Data

世界上有10,000多种鸟类，几乎在所有陆地环境中都能找到它们。这种非凡的多样性是加强公众对科学和自然的参与的关键组成部分，美国经济中观鸟活动产生的数十亿美元的产出就是明证。鸟类表现出复杂的行为、复杂的身体特征和令人印象深刻的适应能力，这使它们成为现代科学研究的主要焦点。在目前的研究中，鸟类是对生物学中一系列基本主题进行比较研究的模型系统。然而，这个原本强大的比较生物学工具包中缺失的一部分是对所有鸟类之间的进化关系(系统发育)的准确和完整的描述，即鸟类的生命树。该项目将收集DNA数据以填补这一空白，为所有鸟类制作一棵完整的生命树，以检验有关鸟类在地球上的起源、多样化和扩散的假说。一棵完整的树将对鸟类学和进化生物学等领域产生变革。该项目将通过培训本科生、研究生和博士后科学家来帮助培养下一代生物多样性科学家，还将包括许多公共宣传部分，包括展品和视频。开发学习模块并与教师合作将有助于将研究带入课堂，接触到几个州的不同学生。最后，研究人员将把从每种鸟类收集的所有数据立即提供给科学界和公众，以便进行广泛的比较分析，并与其他鸟类数据集整合。“大树”--全面的物种水平系统发育--正在给进化生物学领域带来革命性的变化。该项目将为8,000种鸟类生成全基因组标记，并利用来自NSF支持的其他研究的数据产品，为所有10,560种鸟类产生系统发育假说。一个分辨良好的、完整的、有时间校准的、物种水平的鸟类系统发育将允许检验许多具有挑战性的假说，为鸟类分类的系统发育修订提供概念基础，并允许进行旨在阐明产生生物多样性的过程的变革性分析。利用该项目产生的系统发育来检验的具体假设包括：1)新鸟类在K-PG大灭绝后经历了一次快速的辐射；2)洲际扩散的历史塑造了鸟类的多样性；3)物种树方法在基因组规模的系统发育分析中表现优于串联。

There are over 10,000 species of birds and they are found in nearly every terrestrial environment. This remarkable diversity has served as a critical component of enhancing public engagement with science and nature, as evidenced by the multi-billion dollar output generated by bird-watching activities in the US economy. Birds exhibit complex behaviors, elaborate physical characteristics, and impressive adaptations, which has made them a major focus of modern scientific research. In current research, birds are a model system for comparative studies on a range of fundamental topics in biology. However, the missing piece of this otherwise powerful comparative biology toolkit is an accurate and complete description of the evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) among all bird species, i.e., an avian tree of life. This project will collect DNA data to fill this gap by producing a complete tree of life for all bird species in order to test hypotheses regarding the origins, diversification, and dispersal of birds around the planet. A complete tree will be transformative to fields like ornithology and evolutionary biology. This project will help prepare the next-generation of biodiversity scientists by training undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral scientists, and also will include numerous public outreach components including exhibits and videos. Developing learning modules and working with teachers will help bring the research into the classroom, reaching a diversity of students in several states. Finally, the researchers will make all data collected from each bird immediately available to the scientific community and the public to enable broad-scale comparative analyses and integration with other avian data sets."Big trees" - comprehensive species-level phylogenies - are revolutionizing the field of evolutionary biology. This project will generate genome-wide markers for 8,000 species of birds and leverage data products from other NSF-supported studies to produce a phylogenetic hypothesis for all 10,560 bird species. A well-resolved, complete, time-calibrated, species-level phylogeny of birds will allow numerous challenging hypotheses to be tested, provide the conceptual foundation for a phylogenetic revision of bird taxonomy, and permit transformative analyses aimed at elucidating the processes that generate biological diversity. Specific hypotheses to be tested using phylogenies generated by this project include 1) Neoaves underwent a rapid radiation after the K-Pg mass extinction, 2) avian diversification has been shaped by the history of intercontinental dispersal, and 3) species tree methods outperform concatenation in phylogenetic analyses of genome-scale data.