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

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

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.