Robyn E. Drinkwater

Keys are traditionally created from data gathered from real observations, which can be a complex and time-consuming process. With a large number of texts containing written descriptions of species, data needed for the creation of a key are already available. A number of published works on Drosera were chosen and the data in these were used to create an interactive, web-based key. The types of data used were evaluated for ease of use and accuracy and the effectiveness of purely literature-based data was tested. The resulting key highlighted a number of problems of using characters and states which have not been observed, as well as showing that literature-based research can lead to a workable key.