Taxonomy key for classifying living organisms for grass,oak,gum,willow,fern,boxe...

I need a very specific, descriptive language for the above using a taxonomy key

Taxonomy key for classifying living organisms for grass,oak,gum,willow,fern,boxe...
Are you looking for an existing key to identify specimens of these, or is this an assignment to write a key to identify them? Your question isn't really clear on which you're trying to do.



If you are trying to identify specimens to a species level, your library should have several guided for you to use. Since you don't specify a geographic area, the species you'll encounter will vary with region. A book such as the Peterson's Guide to Trees and Shrubs, Gray's Manual of Botany 8th ed., or Manual of Vascular Plants of the Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada will be among the best because they cover a fairly broad region and will include the most species.



If you're looking to wite a key, all you would need to do is find characteristics unique to each plant, and use them in contrasting pairs to separate all the plants into two groups until you have each plant separated.



For instance you could start with:



1A: Plants without a woody stem (grass, fern)......Go to #2

1B: Plants with a woody stem (oak, gum, willow, boxelder)....Go to #3.



2A: Plants reproducing by spores.......Ferns

2B: Plants reproducing by seeds.......Grass



3A: Plants with compound leaves ......Boxelder

3B: Plants with simple leaves........Go to #4



The list of plants cuts off, so without knowing what other plants are included (and not knowing if the gum is a black gum or sweetgum, or what type of oak, these have very different leaves and bark) that's about as far as I can go, but you see how to set up the key. Just remember to use permanent characteristics ("the leaves turn red in the fall" does no good if you're identifying in summer) and the two sets of the pair have to be so the plant is either one or the other.



Since it looks as though most of your plants are trees, see the keys in this link as an example: http://www.oplin.org/tree/
Reply:it might help to post some of the terms you need defining.