Morphometrics is the study of shape and shape change, and it combines aspects of geometry and statistics. Morphometrics has wide applications in systematic biology: quantitative description of species and their differences; characterization of the changes that occur during the development of an individual organism and the evolution of a lineage; and the study of processes that impact on these differences and changes. The field of morphometrics has made rapid advances in the past decade, stemming from the availability of desk-top image analysis systems driven by microcomputers, and the development of several new conceptual approaches to the capture of biological shape information. The limiting factors to the further growth of biological morphometrics have been the lack of appropriate microcomputer software, and the high training threshold that investigators face when attempting to use morphometrics in their research. The Systematic Biology Program of the National Science Foundation supported a two-week training workshop at the University of Michigan in 1988, during which 35 faculty-level researchers were given hands-on training in morphometrics. Since that workshop, a new battery of software packages have been developed by the instructors, to be published with the Workshop Proceedings volume in 1990. Dr. Michael Bell and F. James Rohlf propose a second two-week morphometrics training workshop, to be held on the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York. The Proceedings volume and associated software will be the principal material used in the course, which will train approximately 30 systematic biology researchers in the latest approaches to morphometrics. The proposed training workshop will have wide implications throughout systematic and evolutionary biology. The participants will represent different taxonomic groups and research philosophies, and they will return to their host institutions after the workshop prepared to use and teach the use of an important new research tool. They will be in a position to write competitive grant proposals for equipment acquisition and morphometric research. During the workshop, possible new approaches will be discussed and the place of morphometrics in systematic research will take new form. The workshop will be an important test of the software prior to publication. Training workshops such as this are cost-effective ways to disseminate new methodologies and technologies.
