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Both discrete and continuous characters are supported in MorphoBank. Discrete characters describe a feature as a finite number of analytical states. Examples include "eyes: blue, green or brown" or "wings: present or absent". Continuous characters describe a feature using a decimal quantity or pair of quantities defining a range. Because these quantities are decimals, they can represent any real value and are thus mathematically continuous. (Well, not quite: MorphoBank limits precision to 10 significant digits, but this should be more than enough for most analyses). Examples of continuous character values include "pH: 6.7" or "temperature range: 40.54C - 42.85C".
For discrete characters each state is assigned a number. For example one might implement our previous example as "eyes: state 1 0 (blue), state 2 1 (green), state 3 2 (brown)." These numbers are used when scoring. For continuous characters a single specific quantity or a pair of quantities defining a range must be specified. The units for the quantity are specified in the character description. Each score is simply a decimal value, or pair of values defining the minimum and maximum of a range.
Both discrete and continuous characters and scores may be output in the three file formats Morphobank supports: Nexus, TNT and Micropie.
Currently MorphoBank supports continuous data in TNT format only. Users may place continuous characters throughout their matrix in MorphoBank but when the file is downloaded, all the continuous characters will be organized into a single TNT block.
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