BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA -- New remote sensing technologies
with applications such as predicting problems with ocean fish
stocks and assessing natural disasters were reported at
conferences sponsored recently in Prague by SPIE, the
international society for optics and photonics. The papers and
others from SPIE Remote Sensing have been published in the SPIE
Digital Library, with freely accessible abstracts and full
papers available by rental, pay-per-view or subscription. Color
tells the story To better predict the health of ocean fish
stocks, a team from the University of Malta and the European
Commission Joint Research Centre statistically compared ocean
color values from satellites with values collected in the field.
Surface runoff from land can affect ocean fish stocks by
inhibiting the vitality of chlorophyll in phytoplankton - the
basis of marine food webs. Ocean color can be used to gauge the
productivity of a marine area since it is the measure of
suspended chlorophyll pigment found in the microscop