On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 08:33, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Dear Morphometricians: I am working on a systematic study of a palm
> genus, Geonoma. The species of current interest, G. interrupta, is
quite
> a large palm, and so herbarium specimens (the source of my data) are
> usually fragmentary and not suitable for traditional morphometrics. I

Good luck. Plant folks over the years have met with a good degree of
frustration with geometric morphometrics mainly for the reason mentioned
below.

> want to use landmark data from the flowering branches, specifically
the
> pits in which the flowers are borne. There is quite a lot of variation
> in the spiral arrangement of these pits. 

A critical aspect of landmark-based GM is the assumption of either
evolutionary/developmental or functional homology of the landmarks
across specimens. That is, it is assumed that landmark 3 is the "same"
structure on every specimen  (though similarly-dimensioned, unlabelled
point sets can be analyzed by permutation). 

This is not meant to discourage, but rather to let you know up front
some of the requirements for the most common types of analyses you will
see - Procrustes superimpositions + MV analysis of residuals. You might
look at work by R J Jensen and students on oak leaves and such.

> 
> Anyway, here is my question (I am a complete novice in landmark
> analysis!): I have taken digital images (through a stereomicroscope)
of
> the flowering branches and pit arrangement. How can I obtain x,y
> coordinates from these images? I had thought to use Image J, but this
> may not work.

There is none better for 2D data acquisition than Rohlf's tpsDig
available at the Stony Brook website: http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/morph

My $0.02, ds

> 
> Thanks. Andrew Henderson
> ==
> Replies will be sent to list.
> For more information see
http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/morph/morphmet.html.
-- 
Dennis E. Slice, Ph.D.
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Division of Radiologic Sciences
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA 
27157-1022
Phone: 336-716-5384
Fax: 336-716-2870
==
Replies will be sent to list.
For more information see http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/morph/morphmet.html.

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