All Birds Barcoding Initiative (ABBI) goal:create DNA barcode library for world birds

Why barcode birds?

Practical tool for specimen identification

• Bird strike remains • Non-breeding or juvenile forms in banding operations• Products from endangered species

Help speed discovery of new species

Insight into mitochondrial evolution and population biology

• Many undiscovered bird species are lurking in museum drawers• DNA barcode testing of museum specimens is relatively fast, cheap way to flag genetically divergent specimens

• Avian taxonomy combined with standardized mtDNA analysis is a powerful tool for exploring biology underlying genetic differences within and among species • Limited intraspecific variation supports emerging view that recurrent selective sweeps prune genetic diversity

Target: 9,933 bird species1

Organization: 6 regional working groupsParticipants: 60 researchers, 32 countries

1. ABBI target list based on The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World, 2007

Map adapted from The Speciation and Biogeography of Birds, Newton, 2003

New collecting and non-tissue museum holdings (10 million avian skins, bones, etc) to help fill in gaps

Resources: 70% of world birds are in frozen tissue collections (>230,000 specimens representing 6,853 species)

Access to tissues and restrictions on transport of specimens may be limiting

These approaches are more expensive, slower

Feather or blood samples from live birds Photographs as e-vouchers in reference database?

September 2007: 10,000 barcodes from 2,080 species (21% world birds)

Goal: 100,000 barcodes from 10,000 birds