The VertLife Terrestrial project aimed to make terrestrial vertebrates (Tetrapoda) among the first major global groups of animals with near-complete species-level data regarding key evolutionary and ecological attributes. Tetrapods play a significant role in providing diverse ecological functions, so they are vital to biodiversity monitoring efforts. However, significant knowledge gaps remain in the phylogenetic relationships among species and higher taxa, the taxonomic distributions of ecologically important traits, and geographical distributions of species. Few groups capture societal fascination as strongly as vertebrates. Our research has advanced the understanding of trait variation in vertebrates, their phylogenetic relationships (family tree) and species distributions. Our efforts have especially focused on amphibians and birds, and integration of these data with those for reptiles and mammals generated by other project participants.

The VertLife project fueled progress on spatially defining distribution ranges and tracking type localities for amphibian species, many of which were not covered by any IUCN assessments or other GIS efforts. This is especially true for newly described species of amphibians. The rate of new species being described has not slowed for amphibians, an average of 150 species per year over the past  5 years. We also brought trait compilation and spatial data to the AmphibiaWeb?s database of all amphibian species in the world (https://amphibiaweb.org/), as well as an updated family phylogeny and new educational material. We described, defined distribution ranges, collect trait data, and determine conservation status for three bird species new to science (1 drongo and 2 cisticola's). We compiled 5,795 reptile range maps and have integrated these data with the Map of Life project (https://mol.org/), which also includes maps for all the bird and mammal species of the world. Generating and making these spatial data freely available have helped improve distribution based modeling and analyses of species and clades.

We defined 115 vertebrate traits and compiled trait data for ca. 75% of all amphibians. The project also facilitated our contribution of bird trait data to a database that now contains some 92,000 values encompassing most of the bird species of the world. These data together with the bird Elton Trait dataset are helping to delineate the life history traits for the pilot trait database on the main Vertlife site.

The new Vertlife phylogenetic trees were used to build a family-level consensus tree which is visualized and shared on AmphibiaWeb (https://amphibiaweb.org/taxonomy/AW_FamilyPhylogeny.html) and on the main Vertlife website. We started working with the Open Tree of Life (OTOL) for uploading and sharing these new phylogenies on their platform (https://opentreeoflife.github.io/). Our collaboration included an in-person, free OTOL workshop held at UC Berkeley in February 2020. With AmphibiaWeb, we produced a Primer on Phylogeny and Taxonomy aimed at high school to early undergraduate students freely available online: (https://amphibiaweb.org/taxonomy/index.html) and as a color-blind friendly PDF (https://bit.ly/PhylogenyTaxonomyPrimer). We recognized the importance of students to understand these fundamental concepts and also wanted to give instructors tools for teaching them.

For birds we developed several innovative sequence capture probe-sets that comprise two million probes that capture ca. 10 million base pairs from each individual. The loci comprise 5000 ultra-conserved element loci, 350 anchored-tag loci, 120 long exons (>1000 bp each) drawn from chicken and zebra finch and matched to squamates, ca. 160 introns and >600 functional genes. The array includes the 30 most common loci for birds on GenBank such that we will be able to fully integrate GenBank data into our large bird tree. We have collected data from many endangered species and established that these probes work well on capturing loci using DNA from historical specimens. We have complemented sequence-capture with the collection of whole-genome data from >350 avian genera. Further, the choice of loci was designed to compliment the loci collected by other groups for mammals, amphibians and reptiles. These data together with the GenBank data are now being combined with the objective of producing the first near species-level tetrapod phylogeny, that will be hosted on the Vertlife website and will be linked with the large trait databases we have been building in Amphibiaweb and Map-of-Life.

We have trained 32 undergraduate student apprentices in terrestrial vertebrate and amphibian life history traits and data entry, and 5 student apprentices and a post-baccalaureate volunteer in GIS, specifically georeferencing holotypes, and developing range maps. Three graduate students have been helping to datamine terrestrial vertebrate and amphibian life history traits, as well as with data management. In addition, three graduate students are involved in the sequence-capture part of the project. For two of these graduate students the bird component of the VertLife project is forming part of their dissertations.

A key public dissemination project is our VertLife website, available here: http://vertlife.org/ The website currently displays an outline of the project?s goals, team members (including collaborators and institutions), and news articles on the project and lists >40 publications from the project.

Last Modified: 01/11/2021
Modified by: Rauri Bowie