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Interactive Key to African Plants

Erianthemum commiphorae (Engl.) Danser (Loranthaceae), Tanzania. Photo: D. Kirkup.

The recognition of plant families or genera is usually the first step to species identification but is often one of the most difficult. Knowledge of the major plant families is often assumed in floristic works, which means that they can be difficult for non-experts to use. Interactive keys offer the possibility of a user-friendly identification system to overcome this impediment.

Following discussion between partners at the IBC in Vienna 2005, a collaborative effort was agreed to develop such a key for African plants.

The intention is to quickly produce a web key for African plant families based on Dallwitz and Watson's Angiosperm Families database, as was done for the key to Malesian Seed Plants (2005) produced by the Malesian Key Group  (a consortium between the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the National Herbaria of the Netherlands, Leiden). This family key will serve a precursor to a generic key and will incorporate information extracted from the readily available literature sources so as to reflect the range of morphological variation in Africa, The aim is that by the next Association for the Taxonomic Study of the Flora of Tropical Africa (AETFAT)  meeting in Cameroon 2007, we will able to farm out families to contributors who would be prepared to record data at generic level for each family. The key will link to other digital resources at Kew, such as the online African Floras and so will allow identification to species level by combination of 'matrix' based keys and digitised versions of the traditional dichotomous keys. Other resources that can be linked into the system include digital images of specimens, particularly useful for confirming the results of an identification with the keys or eliminating species by matching.

The first version of the key is available on the internet via the project pages on the Kew website (see http://www.kew.org/herbarium/keys/Africa) and can be viewed with either DELTA INTKEY or LUCID software.

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