الفهرس 
Introduction
Umbelliferae in EgyptOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The Umbelliferae (nom. altern. Apiaceae) comprises some of the most economically useful plants used in Egypt as spices, beverages, and for medicinal purposes. These plants are highly valued both as items of local consumption and as commodities for export, basically owing to their richness in essential oils. The correct identification of plants in general and cultivated species and varieties in particular is vitally important for researchers, students, growers and users alike. The Umbelliferae are represented in the flora of Egypt by 54 species belonging to 30 genera from two of the subfamilies in Drude<U+2019>s (1898) system: subfamily Saniculoideae: represented by one genus (Eryngium L.) and 3 species, subfamily Apioideae: represented by 29 genera and 51 species. Conventional keys to the genera and species representing the Umbelliferae in the flora of Egypt are available in literature. However, this family has been selected as test material for the application of recent computer software programmes designed for key construction because representatives of this family have been recently revised taxonomically and the identity of specimens kept in the Cairo University herbarium (CAI) was properly scrutinized and further ascertained by matching with those kept in the herbarium of Reading University (RNG), UK. The computer programme DELTA has been chosen because: (i) it is easily available online, (ii) it requires little or no special training and can be used by nonexperts, (iii) it generates identification keys with strictly comparable entries of the same couplet, (iv) it is so versatile as to enable the user to mask any character or character sets, thus offering the user the freedom of choice between any number of keys based on any type(s) of characters, and (v) it caters adequately for multistate and quantitative characters as well as inapplicable and missing attributes.