Search
Reset Examples

The search field accepts scientific plant names, i. e. names of genera or Brassicaceae tribes.

Examples:

  • Camelineae — will find information about all member genera of tribe Camelineae.
  • Arabidopsis — will find information about the genus Arabidopsis.

After having typed 3 characters, you'll be provided with suggestions from the database.

Manual

The interactive key presented here is based on data originally compiled by Ihsan A. Al-Shehbaz. Characters and their states have been selected and optimized to identify genera. The matrix and results should not be used for inferences on character state evolution (see Morphology Tool).

Select either appropriate morphologic characters or genera from the given lists. As a result you will get a list of genera described by your selection of character states or a compilation of character states corresponding to your selection of genera. Use the All/Any buttons to select if genera are to be included in the result set only if all of the chosen character states are present or if presence of a single state is sufficient.

In the phylogenetic diagram on the bottom of the page the tribes corresponding to your selection or result will be highlighted and if a distribution range is known it will be diplayed on the world map.

Clicking on any tribe's name will automatically select all of the genera assigned to it and display the respective morphological properties. Clicking on a country in the world map will select genera according to distribution.

The Button "Common characters" will highlight character states that do occur in all of the selected genera, if possible.

Downloads

To run the interactive key locally on your computer you can download it from here as a NaviKey 5 Java™ application.

The complete NaviKey setup is also available as a Java applet within this Website. If you prefer to query the key data in this way you can access it here.

Heidelberg University >  COS Heidelberg >  Biodiversity and Plant Systematics >  BrassiBase

Interactive Key

Description

Most genera of the Brassicaceae are difficult to determine as all available dichotomous keys are based on characters from different developmental stages (e.g. rosette leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds), which are rarely available in one specimen. Furthermore, almost every morphological character used to define genera is homoplastic and therefore, immediate identification using simple dichotomous keys is often difficult. This Interactive Key allows to select all characters, which can be scored (including geographical origin) from the material available, and enable quick identification.

Details

The Interactive Key has been prepared by Ihsan A. Al-Shehbaz with use of NaviKey (Neubacher & Rambold, 2005; http://www.navikey.net) algorithm. It enables quick identification of Brassicaceae genera based on a combination of characters and can be useful even when a number of features are missing.

References

Neubacher, D., Rambold, G. 2005 onwards. NaviKey – a Java applet and application for accessing descriptive data coded in DELTA format: http://www.navikey.net.


/var/www/brassibase/ / https://brassibase.cos.uni-heidelberg.de DE N