The future of avian taxonomy (1 Viewer)

[blackburnian2000]

I'm interested in people's thoughts about what the state of bird taxonomy will be in 20 years or so. For instance, how long will it take to classify all genera/families/orders as monophyletic? Given the decreasing costs of performing phylogenetic studies, I think it could be done. And once the higher-level classification is refined, how much will the final super tree, depicting all the details of bird evolution over the past 120 million years, look like Hackett et al. (2008)? Are cuckoos really sister to Gruiformes? So many questions! What do you think?

 

[Mysticete]

well...I can definitely say it will take a lot more longer than 20 years to sort out the fossil birds, which are still being described and worked out. My guess is that in 20 years research will start shifting more to species level phylogeography as we increasingly have the larger groups sort out. There will probably also start to be a shift in assessing vocalizations, breeding displays, etc for different bird populations to better understand species limits

 

[fugl]

I'm interested in people's thoughts about what the state of bird taxonomy will be in 20 years or so. For instance, how long will it take to classify all genera/families/orders as monophyletic? Given the decreasing costs of performing phylogenetic studies, I think it could be done. And once the higher-level classification is refined, how much will the final super tree, depicting all the details of bird evolution over the past 120 million years, look like Hackett et al. (2008)? Are cuckoos really sister to Gruiformes? So many questions! What do you think?

I raised this question on BF over a year ago:
http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=117588 (Post #13)

There wasn’t a lot of discussion but there were a few interesting responses.