Quantifying Relationships between Near-Infrared Reflectance Spectra of Lake Sediments and Water Chemistry

Abstract

One of the most useful approaches to long-term monitoring of aquatic systems is the analysis of lake sediments. Biological indicators, such as diatoms, preserved in the sediments are widely used. We suggest that use of near-infrared reflectance (NIR) spectroscopy of lake sediments could become a rapid and cost-effective technique for environmental monitoring to follow long-term changes in water quality. NIR spectra of surface sediments from Swedish lakes were used to establish relationships between sediment properties and measured lake water chemistry. Predictive models for inferring total phosphorus (TP), pH, and total organic carbon (TOC) from sediment NIR data were developed using partial least squares regression. The model for inferring lake water TP (n ) 33 lakes) captured 83% of the variance, while the explained variance for pH (n ) 52 lakes) and TOC (n ) 25 lakes) was 85 and 68%, respectively. We also used the TP model to evaluate the effect of inaccuracy in measured lake water chemistry for the model performance, i.e., the amount of explained variance. The inaccuracy in measured lake water chemistry corresponds to 10.5% of the total variance in the model. The highest possible variance to model then being 89.5%. This evaluation indicated that the obtained modeled variance almost equaled the variance possible to model, which suggests that further improvement of the models should be focused on enlargement of the calibration data set to include more lake types.

Ecological applications of near infrared reflectance spectroscopy - a tool for rapid, cost-effective prediction of the composition of plant and animal tissues and aspects of animal performance

“…However, the use of NIRS is not restricted to these types of compositional assays. Korsman et al (1992) and Nilsson et al (1996) have shown that NIRS can be used to predict the past chemical composition of lake water from models of the surface sediments and current water chemistry. A record of the current water chemistry is contained in the surface sediments and once a relationship is established between these parameters, past histories can be evaluated by taking further sediment samples.…”

“…Many of the analytical techniques used in ecology are based on those used in agricultural industries, but NIRS has been little used in ecological studies (but see Brooks et al 1984;Jore et al 1992;Malley et al 1996;Nilsson et al 1996 for notable exceptions). NIRS oers an excellent opportunity for ecologists to escape the constraints of laboratory analyses on the design of their investigations and to apply many laboratory-based measurements to free-ranging animals.…”

Using visible reflectance spectroscopy to reconstruct historical changes in chlorophyllaconcentration in East Antarctic ponds

“…Recently, near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy has been widely considered as an important method for compositional analysis of various chemical constituents in soil, sediment and biological samples (Korsman et al 1992;Nilsson et al 1996;Korsman et al 1999;Font et al 2004;Cohen et al 2005;Das et al 2005;Michelutti et al 2005;Wolfe et al 2006;Michelutti, Blais, Cumming et al 2010;Liu et al 2011). Visible reflectance (page number not for citation purpose) Polar Research 2013.…”

Effects of climate, fire and vegetation development on Holocene changes in total organic carbon concentration in three boreal forest lakes in northern Sweden

“…Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a sensitive tool to assess the organic and inorganic composition of natural materials (Norris et al, 1976;Osborne and Fearn, 1988;Korsman et al, 1992;Nilsson et al, 1996;Bokobza, 1998;Korsman et al, 1999;Das et al, 2005). Recent studies have shown that NIRS data from lake sediments are correlated to lakewater TOC concentrations and that reconstructions among lake types show similar patterns (Rosén, 2005, Rosén andPersson, 2006).…”