Dear Priit Kersen

it is very nice and good,

I think description and pictures/drawings are very helpful for identification guide

Maybe you can search in internet with keyword: ---> Dichotomous Key to Common Aquatic Invertebrates pdf.

thank you

Dear Priit

I congratulate you on taking up this task which I am sure will be of great help to the students and field biologists. My suggestion is to please include general taxonomic keys to scientifically identify different taxon. This will give a deeper understanding about the taxon and encourage the students to take up taxonomic studies every time they come across a new taxon (build up their habit, you know).

Personally I feel that at the end of the monograph you may please include a description of the study area, collection period and the methods you have undertaken to collect and identify the species. In doing so, the readers will get a feeling of the amount of labour you have put into bringing up the monograph. Some of the modern taxonomic guides do follow this.

All the very best.

Dola

It's a beautiful project!.

in my opinion, a good drawing combined with a divulgative picture, are more atractive to students of diverses fields that a complex drawing or a blurry picture...

I think that a good naturalist guide or identification key, must have a dichotomous key, because, it's a good tool for students... Moreover, in the field, a complex key difficult the identification of the organism in situ.

Good luck

The use of photos and drawings will be a boon to those with less experience. Whether the keys are dichotomous or not is not really the issue. It is the quality and appropriateness of the photos and illustrations that will matter. The main problems with dichotomous keys are that they are uneven in the taxonomic information they give for each taxon, and that people often forget that they may find something that is not included. Tabular keys with many characters and illustrations may be better from a taxonomic viewpoint and have the advantage that they are often more useful for identifying incomplete specimens - a common problem in benthic infaunal samples.

I think that a dichotomous key is less necessary in the field, because it will be boring and difficult to use for the students at the moment to identify an organism. Nonetheless I consider you must have the dichotomous key available for consult in the field, because is common to find organisms difficult to identify. I've seen different examples of photograph keys on internet, the PISCO group has an interesting field guide to Oregon's rocky intertidal organisms, which combines photographs and drawings. The LiMPETS group has it own key also, you can find it at http://limpetsmonitoring.org/docs/LiMPETS_Field%20Guide_2012.pdf

Good luck with your project, I've done a photograph key in the past and I understood that is a very hard work, you always want to improve it every time you come to the field.

Any key, dichotomous, multi-entries, etc, is only the beginning of the identification process. They are very helpful for beginners, for instance. But the misuse of keys may cause a lot of colateral damage for the taxonomy of a given group, specially marine taxa. A published key for a certain area, for instance, may be used in other geographical regions – mainly because most areas do not have keys. And the key generally will deliver an identification for the user, but it does not mean that this identification is the correct. After use the key, the user has to be oriented to check the original full description of the identified species, and has to be primarily skeptical with the first identification. But very few users are going to do that, and very fie keys are going to provide the follow up (like, good descriptions, revisions, etc) for the name obtained. Therefore, the conclusion is that the user will have a species name for the specimen, but this may not be the correct one and may cause “noise” in the literature (for instance, for conservation purposes and biogeography). Therefore, my advice for you is to prepare a key providing the follow up of the identification, and to warn the user that he has to check the identification he got at least with the primary literature.

Thank you for good advise so far. I forgot to mention that out filed guide project concerns primarily Estonian (East cost of Baltic Sea) marine benthos, because we haeve any general guide for that.

I think that for student it is better to use so call friendly-using combined keys to taxa where the key couplett are pictured. As example I can refer to book of Foissner et al. 1999: Identification and ecology of limnetic plankton ciliates. I think there are enough similar guides on benthic communities.

My experience identifying algae dates back to a course I took a long time ago but I recall that attempting identification to species often required looking at microscopic details. A field guide that emphasized macrofeatures and took the user to a page that explained many different taxa would have the features involved - and then provide a key/table or something to narrow down the identification and enable checking against a complete description might be a way to go.

Dichotomous (and polychotomous keys/tables) are only tools to aid identification; They are wonderfully helpful,and students do pick up knowledge as they use them - but we should not treat a particular format as a measure of scientific quality. And good illustrations are always a plus.

I think that it is very important to include a key, and a dichotomous one is probably the easiest to use. However, the features used should be well illustrated, include a scale and also, if necessary, the angle from which a feature should be viewed. Students should, if possible, avoid trying to identify a single specimen. It is far better to take several species through the key simultaneously. This increases their interest and, at the same time improves their overall understanding of the group.