A Comparison of the Effectiveness of a Dichotomous Key and a Multi-Access Key to Woodlice

Introduction Species identification, particularly by non-experts is a difficult and often frustrating task. As well as the dichotomous key familiar to most ecologists, taxonomists have developed a range of tools and techniques aimed at easing the task of identification. Increasingly, these tools have used computers either in the production of the key or in the key itself (see Edwards &Morse (1995) and Pankhurst (1991) for reviews). While the theory and implementation of computer-based species identification tools is well developed in a number of areas, much less is known about how well these tools perform in practice (Edwards & Morse 1995). Exceptions to this include Stucky (1984) and Wright et al. (1995) who described evaluation experiments where volunteers were asked to identify species using two identification tools. Both studies compared a novel identification tool (a hypertext key in the study of Wright et al. and a polyclave in Stucky's)