Human activities have been reshaping the natural world for tens of thousands of years, leading to the extinction of hundreds of bird species. Past research has provided evidence of extinction selectivity towards certain groups of species, but trait information is lacking for the majority of clades, especially for prehistoric extinctions identified only through subfossil remains. This incomplete knowledge potentially obscures the structure of natural communities, undermining our ability to infer changes in biodiversity across space and time, including trends in functional and phylogenetic diversity. Biases in currently available trait data also limit our ability to identify drivers and processes of extinction. Here we present AVOTREX, an open-access database of species traits for all birds known to have gone extinct in the last 130,000 years. This database provides detailed morphological information for 610 extinct species, along with a pipeline to build phylogenetic trees that include these extinct species.

中文翻译：

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AVOTREX：灭绝鸟类及其特征的全球数据集


数万年来，人类活动一直在重塑自然世界，导致数百种鸟类灭绝。过去的研究提供了对某些物种群具有灭绝选择性的证据，但大多数分支都缺乏特征信息，尤其是仅通过亚化石遗骸确定的史前灭绝。这种不完整的知识可能会掩盖自然群落的结构，从而削弱我们推断生物多样性随空间和时间变化的能力，包括功能和系统发育多样性的趋势。当前可用特征数据中的偏差也限制了我们识别灭绝驱动因素和过程的能力。在这里，我们介绍了 AVOTREX，这是一个开放访问的物种特征数据库，其中包含过去 130,000 年中已知已灭绝的所有鸟类。该数据库提供了 610 个已灭绝物种的详细形态信息，以及用于构建包含这些已灭绝物种的系统发育树的管道。