The study was implemented to analyze water quality and
phytoplankton in rice – giant freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium
rosenbergii) model in My Xuyen district, Soc Trang province.
The water quality and diversity of phytoplankton were assessed
through four sampling periods from 11/2019 to 1/2020. Six water
samples and phytoplankton were collected at six sampling sites
including one at the water intake, two in the rice field and three
in the ditches. The water quality parameters including
temperature, pH, salinity (S, ‰), dissolved oxygen (DO, mg/L),
biochemical oxygen demand (BOD, mg/L), chemical oxygen
demand (COD, mg/L), amoni (N-NH4
+
, mg/L), nitrite (N-NO2
-
,
mg/L), nitrate (N-NO3
-
, mg/L), total nitrogen (TN, mg/L),
orthophosphate (P-PO4
3-
, mg/L), total phosphate (TP, mg/L) và
sulfate (SO4
2-
, mg/L) were analyzed. Phytoplankton was assessed
through both qualitative and quantitative analysis. In addition,
the diversity Shannon-Wiener index (H’), Pielou’s evenness
index (J’), Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) and
Pearson’s correlation were also conducted to evaluate the
relationship between water quality and diversity of phytoplankton
in the system. The results revealed that the water quality in the
rice-shrimp system was relatively suitable for shrimp and rice,
but BOD, COD, N-NH4
+
, P-PO4
3-
could result in an adverse
effect on shrimp due to the bloom of phytoplankton; therefore,
the water in the system should be exchanged regularly to avoid
excessive nutrient accumulation. Eighty-six species of
phytoplankton belonging to five phyla of Bacillariophyta,
Chlorophyta, Dinophyta, Cyanophyta and Euglenophyta were
discovered in this study. The values of H’ and J’ ranging from
2.0 to 3.3 and 0.8-0.9, respectively indicated high diversity and
evenness of phytoplankton phyla in the system. The H’ values
classified water quality from medium to good. The results of CCA
indicated that the distribution of phytoplankton in the system
depended on factors such as temperature, salinity, N-NH4
+
, NNO3
-
, TN, P-PO4
3-
and TP. Besides that, Pearson analysis showed
that the abundance of the dominant species of phytoplankton was
closely correlated with temperature, salinity, BOD, COD and NNH4
+
. This relationship illustrated the ability to quickly monitor
water quality in shrimp ponds by using phytoplankton.