Aquatic Plants

This text describes the temperature, water, fertilizer and light needs of more than 300 aquarium plants. Artificial lighting - lamp types, colour temperatures and mounting - is discussed in detail and the author provides advice on choosing the right plants for an aquarium. Ecological factors, flower biology and morphology and reproduction methods receive detailed coverage. The book contains colour photographs with nearly all plants depicted with fully developed submerged foliage. Botanists as well as professional and amateur keepers should find this book useful.

Aquatic Plants: Pharmaceutical and Cosmetic Applications provides a concise description of popular aquatic plants found across the globe. The chapters in this beautifully illustrated, full-color book focus on the aquatic species native to specific continents. Written by a global team of experts, this book explains the distribution, ethnobotanical uses, genome sequencing, chemical compounds, and biological activity of these plants and addresses the cultivation and sustainable production of aquatic and wetland plants. Features: Describes the biological activity of a large collection of aquatic plants. Color photographs highlight each plant’s ethnobotanical characteristics, and structural formulae show their chemical constituents. Contributions come from leading scientists from countries including the United States, India, Mauritius, South Africa, and Cyprus. Aquatic Plants: Pharmaceutical and Cosmetic Applications is a valuable resource for academics conducting research on aquatic plants and for professionals in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries who are involved with the therapeutic applications of these plants and their sustainable usage.

This book contains extended versions of papers presented at the 1st International Conference on Lake Sustainability held at the Wessex Institute of Technology (WIT) campus in the New Forest. The meeting is a natural link in the chain of sustainability conferences that WIT regularly arranges. A wide spectrum of contributions focusing on lake sustainability and many up-to-date aspects of lake management and limnology are covered by the fifteen papers selected for publication The papers draw an excellent picture of the recent developments in lake modelling, limnology of lakes and lake management. Readers will find useful the sustainability image of lakes presented in this volume.

Contamination of the different components of environment through industrial and anthropogenic activities have guided new eras of research. This has lead to development of strategies/methodologies to curtail/minimize environmental contamination. Research studies conducted all over the globe established that bioremediation play a promising role in minimizing environmental contamination. In the last decade, phytoremediation studies have been conducted on a vast scale. Initial research in this scenario focused on screening terrestrial plant species that remove contaminants from soil and air. Later, scientific community realized that water is a basic necessity for sustaining life on earth and quality of which is getting deteriorated day by day. This initiated studies on phytoremediation using aquatic plants. Role of aquatic plant species in cleaning water bodies was also explored. Many of the aquatic plant species showed potential to treat domestic, municipal and industrial wastewaters and hence their use in constructed wetlands for treating wastewaters was emphasized. The present book contains five chapters. First two chapters provide information about types of contaminants commonly reported in wastewaters and enlists some important and well studied aquatic plant species known for their potential to remove various contaminants from wastewater. Subsequent chapters deal with mechanisms involved in contaminant removal by aquatic plant species, and also provide detailed information about role of aquatic plant species in wetlands. Potential of constructed wetlands in cleaning domestic and industrial wastewaters has also been discussed in detail. The strategy for enhancing phytoremediation capacity of plants by different means and effectiveness of phytoremediation technology in terms of monitory benefits has been discussed in last chapter. Last chapter also emphasizes the future aspects of this technology.

Aquatic plants refer to a diverse group of aquatic photosynthetic organisms large enough to be seem with the naked eye, and the vegetative parts of which actively grow either permanently or periodically (for at least several weeks each year) submerged below, floating on, or growing up through the water surface. These include aquatic vascular plants, aquatic mosses and some larger algae. Aquatic plants are grouped into life forms, each of which relates differently to limiting factors and has distinct ecological functions in aquatic ecosystems. Life form groups include emergent macrophytes (plants that are rooted in sediment or soils that are periodically inundated, with all other structures extending into the air), floating-leaved macrophytes (rooted plants with leaves that float on the water surface), submersed macrophytes (rooted plants growing completely submerged), free submerged macrophytes (which are not rooted but attached to other macrophytes or submerged structures) and free-floating macrophytes (plants that float on the water surface). Aquatic plants play an important role in the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems by altering water movement regimes, providing shelter and refuge and serving as a food source. In addition, aquatic plants produce large standing crops which can also stabilize sediments, accumulate large amounts of nutrients thus improving water healthy. Thus, because of their ecological role, aquatic plants are an important component of aquatic ecosystems. Aquatic plants are very vulnerable to human activities and global changes, and many species of the plants had become endangered in the past several decades due to habitat loss, flooding, damming, over foraging, biological invasion and eutrophication, which might not be halted but enforced in the future when more extreme weathers coincide with enhanced human activities.

A Manual of Aquatic Plants can be said to be a classic; it made the identification of aquatic plants in sterile as well as in flowering or fruiting condition as simple as possible, and covers a region from Minnesota to Missouri and eastward to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Virgina.