Acknowledgements
Material for this lecture was borrowed and adopted from
Learning objectives
Learning objectives
At the end of this lesson you will:
- Understand the overview of a morphometrics analysis
Overview
Morphometric Workflow
Typical Morphometric Worflow
- Ask interesting question, develop hypotheses, collect specimens
- Take photos/images of the specimens
- Place landmarks on the specimens in the photos at key locations. Choose landmarks that are:
- Present on all specimens
- Relevant to question
- Clearly defined
- Analyze how the landmarks vary in relation to each other among specimens
- Perform statistical analyses to test for significant differences in body shape among populations, species, or whatever aspect that is relevant to your hypotheses
- Plot components of variation in shape that are not correlated with each other (i.e. the principal component scores).
Types of Questions that Morphometrics can Answer (not exhaustive)
- Relationship of parts to other parts.
- Allometry - relationship of shape to size
- Comparison among groups
- Covariation of shape with other factors
- Covariation of morphology with phylogeny
- Morpholgical integration
- Modularity