A valid method to determine the site of drowning

The diatom test is considered a useful aid in determining the site of death from drowning. Nevertheless, there is disagreement within the scientific community concerning its reliability, and its findings have been challenged and sometimes overturned in courts of law. Using a model based on animal experimentation, we have developed a diatom test to discriminate between the locations of drowning sites from different aquatic systems. We carried out a complementary combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses together with a statistical analysis based on the Kullback-Leibler distance of the samples. A restrictive selection of exclusive diatom species from each reservoir was also made. This approach allowed us to validate the usefulness of the diatom test in determining the location of the site of drowning.