ESTIMATING THE PRECISION OF FILAMENTOUS BLUE-GREEN ALGAE CELL CONCENTRATION FROM A SINGLE SAMPLE
✍ Scribed by GEOFF M. LASLETT; R. MALCOLM CLARK; GARY J. JONES
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 281 KB
- Volume
- 8
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1180-4009
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✦ Synopsis
Toxic blooms of blue-green algae are a continuing environmental problem in many regions of the world. Any scienti®c study of these cyanobacteria involves estimating the concentration of cyanobacterial cells, and its associated precision, from a single sample. The cell concentration is a product of the mean number of cells per trichome and the number of trichomes per ml. We investigate statistical models for these quantities, and suggest that the translated Sichel model comfortably ®ts the distribution of number of cells per trichome. The most common cell-counting scheme in Australian laboratories involves a form of inverse sampling. We estimate the cell concentration and its precision by maximum likelihood, taking into account the nature of the sampling scheme and the properties of the Sichel distribution. We also investigate several alternative short-cut counting schemes, and recommend methods for estimating cell concentration and its precision in these cases.