USING THE ZOOIMAGE AUTOMATED SYSTEM FOR THE ABUNDANCE AND BIOMASS ESTIMATION OF COPEPODS FROM THE SW ATLANTIC OCEAN.

DI MAURO, R.; CEPEDA, G.; CAPITANIO, F; VIÑAS, M D

Niza, Francia

Congreso; ASLO; 2009

ASLO

Recent advances in automated counting and identifying zooplankton using image analysis systems provide opportunities to rapidly analyze samples for abundance and biomass estimations. Zooplankton samples were collected with a babybongo net in neritic waters off the Buenos Aires province, Argentina (34°-41°S). Images were obtained from 33 digitized samples and analyzed with ZooImage software in order to compare automatic and traditional (microscopic) estimations of copepod abundance and biomass. Subsamples were taken according to the density of organisms, and sieved into two fractions with a 500 µm mesh to maximize the number of individuals in the scanning cells without overlapping. A training set composed by all zooplankton categories was built. Copepods were discriminated according to size into big calanoids, small calanoids and cyclopoids using LDA recognition algorithm. Size/Biovolume equations of copepods from the study area were included in the software to estimate biomass. There were no significant differences for any of the copepod categories between manual and automatic counting. Present results emphasize the utilization of ZooImage method as a great potential tool in quantitative estimations of copepods.