Abstract
The enormous variability in the concentration of plant toxins and nutrients in trees, shrubs and forbs require extensive sampling to accurately represent the nutritional and toxicology landscape and this is an ideal application for quantitative near infrared (NIR) reflectance spectroscopy. The speed of NIR spectroscopic analysis makes it ideally suited to environmental monitoring and ecological investigations where large numbers of replicates need to be measured. NIR spectroscopy can also be used to measure a variety of functional assays of protein precipitation capacity with good precision. Using the data from a series of captive feeding experiments with NIR spectra, scientists can model animal food preferences. Models of feeding preferences based on NIR spectra capture both the chemical complexity in nutrients and toxins but also variation in the behavior of animals. Using animal faeces to predict quality of the food eaten is an indirect use of qualitative NIR analysis.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 6-9 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | Spectroscopy Europe |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Publication status | Published - Oct 2009 |