My question for the morphometrics community is how to handle and absent and duplicated features in your landmark data. I am asking about true biological variation here, and not just missing data. Because these are real specimens, you cannot easily disregard some just because they don’t easily fit into our morphometric methods – or at least you shouldn’t disregard them for that reason. But the question remains, what do we do?
One suggestion I have had for the absent data is to over digitize the nearest landmark locations, essentially digitizing each point twice. I am not sure that this would work logically, but it’s the only solution I have heard of. I suppose, if you knew that there would be duplicated features you could create your digitizing scheme with the over digitizing in place until you reached the duplicated features. I’m still not sure how well that would work. So, I send this out to the collective brains of the morphometric community. What do we do in this situation? Thanks for you input. */Thomas M. Greiner, Ph.D./* Assistant Professor of Anatomy University of Wisconsin – La Crosse Department of Health Professions 4054 Health Science Center 1725 State Street La Crosse, WI 54601 Phone: (608) 785-8476 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Replies will be sent to the list. For more information visit http://www.morphometrics.org
