Publisher's Synopsis
This package applies the interactive identification and information retrieval program INTKEY to 563 world-level, DELTA descriptions of the families of Angiosperms. The CD-ROM carries MS-DOS files containing the program and data, along with 680 high quality line drawings from three classic early works, and some sample coloured and black-and-white photos. Also included are references, and a complete set of conventional descriptions, which may be displayed on screen or printed in typeset form.;The package is designed primarily for teachers, students and botanical researchers concerned with identifying and classifying flowering plants, and for researchers in related disciplines interested in detecting taxonomic patterns, or wanting to select taxonomically balanced samples for experimental work. It offers automated facilities for conducting morphological, anatomical, phytochemical (etc.) assessments of rival classifications and purported phylogenies, and for generating and testing hypotheses in connection with structure/function relationships.;Every Angiosperm family is represented by a world-level morphological description, usually augmented by at least one illustration. Facilities are provided for isolating regional subsets of families (e.g. for Australia, North and South America, Eurasia, tropical Africa, Malesia). Comprehensive information is included on geographical distributions, on variation in photosynthetic pathways (with lists of the genera known to include C[4] and/or CAM species), and on the recorded occurrence of leaf phloem transfer cells (the latter summarising data not published elsewhere). Copious data are compiled on other aspects of general interest, for example seedling germination type, embryology, anther ontogeny, pollen cytology and morphology, stigma type, sieve-tube plastids, leaf, stem, nodal and wood anatomy, and phytochemistry (phenolics, alkaloids, cyanogenesis, etc.). Also included are family synonyms; numbers of species and genera per family; the classifications of Dahlgren, Cronquist and Takhtajan for Dicotyledons, and of Dahlgren, Clifford and Yeo for Monocotyledons; and assignment of Dicotyledons to the major groups Crassinucelli and Tenuinucelli of Young and Watson.;The program INTKEY offers research features for taxonomic identification and information retrieval which are lacking in less sophisticated programs. They include optional display of extended notes on characters and character state definitions; direct handling of numeric values; ability to alter the treatments of unknowns, inapplicables and overlapping values, as required for different applications; retrieving text information (exemplified here by synonyms, references etc.); restricting operations to subsets of characters or taxa; defining keywords to represent subsets of characters and taxa; locating characters by included words, and taxa directly by name;;specifying "character reliabilities" appropriate for particular purposes; obtaining lists of taxa possessing or lacking particular attributes or combinations of attributes; preparing lists of taxa uncoded for particular characters or sets of characters; listing similarities or differences between taxa (with ability to vary the interpretations of "similarity" and "difference"); describing, comparing, contrasting, and diagnosing taxa, in terms of specified sets of characters; controlling output as screen displays and/or hard copy, and generating files suitable for input to other DELTA programs (for example; to highlight diagnostic features in printed descriptions); screen display of illustrations of characters and taxa. It handles large sets of data, as exemplified by the present one, with acceptable response times.
