It is important to realise that the definitions here are specific to CLAMP.

Leaf architectural terms used for taxonomic purposes do not necessarily apply to CLAMP, which focusses on characters in the context of their relationship with climate. It is important that you read carefully the definitions here and do not assume that the taxonomic descriptive terms that you may already be familiar with are appropriate for scoring. If you do not adhere to these definitions, which have been used in constructing the calibration data sets, you will get poor results.

When scoring fossil material in which parts of a leaf may be missing, it is important that you do not 'guess' or 'reconstruct' the missing parts. CLAMP is remarkably robust to missing data so it is better to just leave that character blank in the scoresheet.

Note that when using CLAMP Scoresheets, which simplifies much of this process, enter "1" if a character state is present or leave blank if it is absent.

Click here for a pdf version of leaf character definitions.

For a zipped .pdf of these scoring instructions click here.

To see how these character states and scoring criteria are entered on the "classic" score sheet click here.

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