ATOL: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH Early Bird: A Collaborative Project to Resolve the Deep Nodes of Avian Phylogeny

Early Bird is a large-scale, cooperative effort among five institutions in the U.S., one in Scotland and two in Australia to determine the evolutionary relationships among all major groups of birds. The project will make these relationships known to the research community and the public, and make it possible to use these relationships as a comparative framework with which to organize and understand the vast amount of information already available on avian ecology, evolution, physiology, and behavior. The project will generate large amounts of DNA sequence data for all major avian lineages from a series of carefully selected genes. These data will be integrated with existing and new morphological and fossil data to bring all relevant evidence to bear on the problem. Extensive analysis of the evidence will be conducted with the rapidly expanding suite of computational tools available for the inference of relationships, divergence times, and evolutionary patterns. The data will be made accessible to other researchers in an online database with tools for analysis and export, and to the general public through a website with background information on the importance of evolutionary relationships, progress reports on the project, and interactive educational tools with which interested persons can explore the data themselves.

The immediate results of this project will be to provide a detailed, comprehensive and robust estimate of the 'family tree' of avian relationships, and to facilitate the use of that tree to organize and interpret other information about birds. The impact of this project on science and society will be far-reaching. Birds are among the most prominent and engaging creatures in most ecosystems worldwide. They have been the subject of an extraordinary number and diversity of scientific studies that figure largely in our understanding of the natural world and humanity's place in it. Their position high in many food chains together with their great mobility makes them sensitive indicators of environmental quality, and monitoring of bird populations is widely used to set conservation and management priorities. Their powers of flight, physical beauty, and captivating behaviors amaze and inspire us, and birds provide tremendous amounts of recreation for serious hunters and birders, as well as millions of backyard birdwatchers each year. All of these human interactions with birds will be enriched by a better understanding of avian evolutionary history and genetic diversity, which Early Bird will provide.