Towards a digital key to the lichens of Italy
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Towards a digital key to the lichens of Italy Pier Luigi Nimis 1
&
Stefano Martellos 1
Received: 29 June 2020 / Accepted: 3 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Work is in progress for the completion of a computer-aided key to all lichens known to occur in Italy, which will be freely available online, and as a free application for mobile devices. A first example, concerning the lichens of Northern Italy (2.339 infrageneric taxa), is already available online for testing. A computer-generated but manually edited dichotomous key is invoked for all species previously filtered via a multi-entry interface, where several selected characters can be specified in a single step. To optimize the two query interfaces, two different datasets are used, one for the dichotomous, the other for the multi-entry interface. Keywords Biodiversity . E-keys . Flora . Identification . Lichenized fungi
1 Introduction Traditionally, most identification tools for lichens were paper-published as dichotomous, or more rarely polytomous keys. The structure of such keys typically consists of a series of alternative statements, called “leads”. All leads that need to be evaluated for a single decision form a “couplet”. Dichotomous keys are a special case of polytomous keys, and a key may be also a mixture of simple polytomous and complex dichotomous choices. The generalizing term “single-access key” is used here to include both dichotomous and polytomous keys. The equivalent term in computer science is “decision tree” (Hagedorn et al. 2010). The advent of computers has allowed the generation of other types of keys, such as free-access and multi-entry keys (Hagedorn et al. 2010). Free-access keys (also known as matrix keys) are alternative to single-access keys. Whereas in a single-access key the sequence of choices (decisions) is fixed by the author (providing a single path to each result), in a free-access key it is up to users, which, at every step, can select from a list one character state at a time. Thus, a free-access key is the set of all possible single-access keys that arise by permutating the order of characters. Although printable free-access keys do exist, they are most suitable for computer-aided identification * Pier Luigi Nimis [email protected] 1
Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
tools, and have a long development history. Examples are DELTA-IntKey (Dallwitz et al. 2000 onwards), NaviKey (Neubacher and Rambold 2005 onwards), and Xper3 (Vignes Lebbe et al. 2016). Well-known free-access key for lichens are those provided by LIAS (Rambold et al. 2014). While in a free-access key users must select a single character state at each step of the identification process, multi-entry keys permit to use several characters at the same time, via a multi-character query-form. This first step can be followed by either a field-guide-like page, illustrating the remaining taxa, or (as in the case of our keys) by a dynamically generated single-access key to those taxa only. After the completion of a new checkl
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