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.
