A SIMPLE METHOD FOR COMPUTERIZING TAXONOMIC TREATMENTS

Standard taxonomic treatments are very well adapted to computerization . A method is presented for producing taxonomic treatments using stand ard commercial software (spreadsheets and word processors). The data f rom morphological descriptions and other elements of the treatments ar e stored in the spreadsheet with taxa as rows and characters as column s, and the descriptions are generated using a print merge routine, ava ilable in most word processors. Departures from parallelism necessitat ed by structural differences between taxa or by missing data are easil y accommodated using conditional statements in the print merge. Exampl es are given to illustrate the approach. Treatments prepared in this w ay are easy to edit for parallelism and internal consistency, and form at changes can be entered once for incorporation throughout the treatm ent. This approach can be used to produce taxonomic treatments in an e asily editable form, or as a framework for developing a data structure for use in a database or specialized taxonomy program.