Interactive guides vs dichotomous keys
Ann.Fraser
Douglas Yanega
I'm willing to go out on a limb here, and say that a well-designed interactive guide (assuming I understand what you mean by that; see below) should always ultimately give results faster, in proportion to the number of taxa. For example, if you have ever tried to start from scratch with Laberge's Andrena keys, you're in for a very long and bumpy ride; it might take you hours to get any given specimen to species, in part because it's hard to even get the correct subgenus on the first try. Same for Perdita. Even the really stellar keys, like McGinley's Lasioglossum key, are a chore to plow through, just because of the number of couplets.
The more species, the harder it is to work through the keys without going down dead ends, so keys get slower and slower as they get bigger.
When I think of an interactive guide, I think of matrices. There may be a few of you here who used the CD-ROM for beetle families a few decades back, in which you could check off character states in a matrix, and it would narrow down the list of possible outcomes that had the characters you indicated, until you were left with only one family. That was a really useful tool, and once you knew how to score characters, it could go incredibly quickly.
The primary advantages are threefold: (1) not every specimen has every part of its anatomy intact or visible, and a dichotomous key can fail completely if a certain feature is not possible to see. A matrix doesn't fail just because you can't assess a single certain character, unless you're really unlucky and it's the only character that separates two similar taxa. (2) Certain taxa have some feature that is uniquely distinctive, and such taxa should all be instantly identifiable; with a key, only one taxon can be IDed per couplet (so if there are, say, 20 utterly unique species, it takes at least 20 couplets to get all of them taken care of), but with a matrix, all the unique taxa should each only take one step to ID. (3) You can toss all sorts of things into a matrix that would overwhelm a key, like geographic distribution, host plants, and phenology (things that aren't morphological), or features that are randomly distributed among taxa (like body color), and would clutter a key, but would still narrow down the list of possible taxa in a matrix.
I can't honestly see how dichotomous keys can ever be a faster alternative.
Peace,
-- Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 phone: 951-827-4315 FaceBook: Doug Yanega (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's) https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
James Cane
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"Knowledge and comprehension are the joy and justification of humanity"
Alexander von Humboldt
Droege, Sam
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Here in Maryland I am particular fond of:
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DL Guides
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Mike Arduser's unpublished dichotomous guides (available from Mike and us)(many of which have been incorporated into the DL Guides)
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Mitchell's 2 volumes of the Bees of the Eastern United States (available as pdfs)
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The various revisions of the bees that overlap with my area are useful, but that literature is scattered and you have to make your own paper/digital collection and then have to keep taxonomic changes in mind.
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I like what Linc best et al. did in the Pacific Northwest in a recent paper, which is to summarize all the appropriate taxonomic papers and resources. I suppose our Bee Lab should do something like that nationally since we have purview, but we just don't have the staff (i.e.its just Sydney and myself). It's a potential great collaborative project.
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But yes, head-to-head, evaluations of success using sets of known specimens would be a great way to learn about patterns of use among those who need to identify bees and potential corrections.
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A possible complicating factor is that anyone using keys will begin to memorize each of them and develop mind pictures of the characters, couplets, and specimens based on simply slogging through any guide over a period of time. It is also to be expected that the writer of a key or guide often is misled regarding their guide's usefulness because they are so intimate with the details and species that they have little use for their own guide. (hmmm, I wonder how well AI would be at using/developing id guides)
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The final step in the identification process is a comparison with know specimens. But good luck finding such things as despite countless bee projects at universities, most do not have a repositor and those specimens are usually simply food for dermestids on some dusty shelf at the former grad student's home.
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In the end we all must advocate for the creation, access, and sustenance of both museums and taxonomists to provide access to well identified specimens and concomitant double checking because all published guides are imperfect as well as almost immediately out of date and we all need our material reviewed because we all fall short of perfection in the identification of bees.
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Anyone who wishes can visit the Bee Lab here outside of Washington D.C. And Baltimore and use both our extensive collection of "known" specimens and have us look over their collections.
Sam
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 8:39 AM
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Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Beemonitoring] Interactive guides vs dichotomous keys
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LR Best
https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/technical_reports/73666f35q
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Victor H. Gonzalez Betancourt
· Students spent less time with “Bees in your Backyard” per specimen (6 minutes) but accuracy was lowest (30%). For DL, students spent about twice the time they spent with “Bees in your Backyard” but accuracy was greater (50%). Students spent more than 20 min per specimen using “The bee genera of North and Central America” but all specimens were incorrectly identified.
· DL was easier for students to identify bees than the Bee Genera Book but more difficult than “bees in your backyard”.
· Students found DL similar to the other two books in terms of the quality of illustrations, language, layout, and motivation, except for “Bees in your Backyard”, which students rated higher in terms of the illustrations. (see figures below)
--it would be nice to have a good study on this. --Victor
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