A collborative effort to:
1. Produce (rather quickly) a web
key for African plant families based on Dallwitz and
Watson's Angiosperm Families database. This will
serve a precursor to a generic key.
This "African Family Key" would incorporate some
modifications from the readily avalable literature sources
so as to reflect the range of morphological variation in
Africa, but we don't intend at this stage that these
changes would be exhaustive.
The family concepts
adopted in the Dallwitz and Watson Angiosperm Families database
will not be changed since the scoring will soon be refined
at the level of genus.
2. We aim that
by summer 2006 we will begin to farm
out families to contributors who would be prepared to
record data at generic level for each family.
We propose to produce a table for each "family", in
which each row is a genus, the columns are the
characters and the scores for which would automatically
be filled out from the database with the basic (i.e. family
level) information. The genera could then be edited quite
quickly from this, conceivably, only the characters that
are variable within a family needing to be checked.
Introduction
