I want to be able to input a spreadsheet where each row is a species (or whatever individual specimen), and the columns are identifying properties (flower colour, leaf size, whatever) - and then have the program produce the most efficient order/arrangement for an ID key.

So it would ideally ignore and eliminate properties that weren't useful, and would put the rest in an order that made the shortest key for the most species.

Does it exist?? Or does everyone just do it manually every time 😬

@TradescantiaHub I'm not sure I understand the problem. Can you give an example?

@peterdrake A dichotomous key is like a flow chart for identifying a species. Each step is something like "what colour are the flowers? pink -> go to 2, blue -> go to 3". Here's a random example of a dichotomous key: https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/dkey/achillea/#all

Assembling one means making decisions about which identifying feature should be question 1, which should be question 2, which should be ignored/excluded from the key, and so on.

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@peterdrake I want something that will automate those decisions for me, once I input a database which contains every identifying feature for every species covered by the key. So there would be a column for "flower colour", the value for species 1 would be "pink", the value for species 2 would be "blue", and so on - the same for every feature included. Then the program would search consider all the species and features, and decide the best order to present the questions in.

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