Ra. Varela et al., DETERMINING THE CONTRIBUTION OF PIGMENTS AND THE NONALGAL FRACTIONS TO TOTAL ABSORPTION - TOWARD AN IMPROVED ALGORITHM, Limnology and oceanography, 43(3), 1998, pp. 449-457
Three methods that estimate the algal and nonalgal contributions to th
e total particulate matter light absorption were analyzed against the
experimental Kishino method in a wide variety of environments. We foun
d that one method gave better overall correlations and slopes closer t
o 1 than did the other methods, but the method overestimated the nonal
gal fraction when the nonalgal absorption to total particulate matter
absorption proportion in the sample was low. As a result, a correction
is suggested and results are compared with those of the other methods
, showing that the combined use of the original algorithm and the corr
ection do configure a suitable basis for differentiating the algal and
nonalgal fractions using as input only the total particulate light ab
sorption data.