A. Plants without flowers — Plant #1
A. Plants with flowers
B. solitary terminal flower—Plant #3
B. raceme inflorescence
C. flower is white— plant #2
C. flower is yellow— plant # 4
Dichotomous key
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A. Plants without flowers — Plant #1
A. Plants with flowers
B. solitary terminal flower—Plant #3
B. raceme inflorescence
C. flower is white— plant #2
C. flower is yellow— plant # 4
Comments are closed.
This key worked well for me! When I first observed the plants, I had the same instinct to first distinguish the plants by if they had flowers or not – I think that this distinction works well for the plants we have. Your next distinction I think is really creative; I didn’t fully notice that only plant #3 had a solitary terminal flower until I read your dichotomous key! This way of separating plant #3 from the others is very effective, and I can’t think of any way that people might get confused. Even if all of the flowers except for one fell off of plants #2 and #4, I think it would still be clear that they had lost part of their anatomy, so they would not get confused with plant #3. Finally, at level C the distinction between flowers #2 and #4 works quite well. I noted the same characteristics in my key – I feel like this is the easiest and most obvious way to distinguish between the two plants, which for this type of key is exactly what you want. Overall this key works very well. The only possible thing I could think to add would be either more description or more specific characteristics for each plant at each level, but really this key gets the job done well without those aspects. Nice job!