The taxonomic identification of diatom species that constituted phytoplankton communities in remote times is determining in several research fields like ecology, evolution, paleoecology and biostratigraphy. In the last 30 years the use of fossil diatoms like environmental indicators has become of prime importance. However, the use of these organisms is limited since they are found in sediment samples mostly fragmented or pulverized. This may lead to confusion and loss of information. In this work we used invariant correlation to identify 12 species of fossil diatoms. With this method we were able to identify the diatom species from only a small fragment of the organisms. This methodology can be used for the development of an automated system of plankton identification. An automatized identification of diatoms would be able to guarantee a faster identification of diatoms would be able to guarantee a faster identification and also would reduce the time necessary and also would reduce the time necessary for accomplishing analysis of samples highly fragmented.

Date Published: 14 August 2001
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 4419, 4th Iberoamerican Meeting on Optics and 7th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers, and Their Applications, (14 August 2001); doi: 10.1117/12.437080

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4419:
4th Iberoamerican Meeting on Optics and 7th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers, and Their Applications
Vera L. Brudny; Silvia A. Ledesma; Mario C. Marconi, Editor(s)