During the last 20 years, SAM has developed a multiplicity of hypothesis-driven conservation and restoration projects. Being home to the oldest Community-based coral aquaculture and reef rehabilitation program in the Caribbean, we aim to develop a variety of scientific publications that highlight our commitment towards the conservatiion of our marine resources. Most publications are freely available on our website.
Peer reviewed publications
Torres-Pérez, Juan L.; Guild, Liane S.; Armstrong, Roy A.; Corredor, Jorge; Zuluaga-Montero, Anabella; Polanco, Ramón Relative Pigment Composition and Remote Sensing Reflectance of Caribbean ShallowWater Corals Journal Article In: PlosONE, vol. 10, iss. 11, pp. 1-20, 2015.2015
@article{Torres-Pérez2015b,
title = {Relative Pigment Composition and Remote Sensing Reflectance of Caribbean ShallowWater Corals},
author = {Juan L. Torres-Pérez and Liane S. Guild and Roy A. Armstrong and Jorge Corredor and Anabella Zuluaga-Montero and Ramón Polanco},
editor = {Wayne Iwan Lee Davies},
url = {https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0143709
https://www.sampr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Relative-Pigment-Composition-and-Remote-Sensing-Reflectance-of-Caribbean-ShallowWater-Corals.pdf},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0143709},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-11-30},
urldate = {2015-11-30},
journal = {PlosONE},
volume = {10},
issue = {11},
pages = {1-20},
abstract = {Reef corals typically contain a number of pigments, mostly due to their symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic dinoflagellates. These pigments usually vary in presence and concentration and influence the spectral characteristics of corals. We studied the variations in pigment composition among seven Caribbean shallow-water Scleractinian corals by means of High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) analysis to further resolve the discrimination of corals. We found a total of 27 different pigments among the coral species, including some alteration products of the main pigments. Additionally, pigments typically found in endolithic algae were also identified. A Principal Components Analysis and a Hierarchical Cluster Analysis showed the separation of coral species based on pigment composition. All the corals were collected under the same physical environmental conditions. This suggests that pigment in the coral’s symbionts might be more genetically-determined than influenced by prevailing physical conditions of the reef. We further investigated the use of remote sensing reflectance (Rrs) as a tool for estimating the total pigment concentration of reef corals. Depending on the coral species, the Rrs and the total symbiont pigment concentration per coral tissue area correlation showed 79.5–98.5% confidence levels demonstrating its use as a non-invasive robust technique to estimate pigment concentration in studies of coral reef biodiversity and health.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}