Characteristics of polarization techniques for the separation of the overlapping fluorescence and reflectance applied to algae in seawater

We examine the use, characteristics and potential of polarization discrimination techniques developed by us in which the polarization properties of elastically scattered light and the unpolarized nature of any fluorescence excited are utilized to separate the fluorescence component from the reflectance spectra of algae. These techniques are applied here to seawater algae in a variety of conditions both in the laboratory and in the field. We show that they are effective for extracting the chlorophyll fluorescence in the 685 nm region from reflectance spectra dominated by chlorophyll pigments for different types of algae with the illumination by polarized and unpolarized light