An attempt to develop spectrophotometry as a proxy for sedimentary studies in estuarine environments

In deep-sea sediment studies, reflectance has been used as a proxy for high vs. low productivity intervals for several years. This value of the white-black scale is obtained through the use of spectrophotometers when using the CIE Lab color system, which also gives values on green-red and blue-yellow scales. In estuarine/continental sediment studies, color data are still often based on Munsell Table which does not allow to obtain numeric and continuous data and which is biased by the observer’s choice