An exploration of the relationships between microalgae biomass growth and related environmental variables

Biomass of algae growth on natural water medium

“…Algal community plays an important role as the primary producer and as a major biotic component in the nutrient/energy cycle in any aquatic habitats [1,2]. In addition to the producer role, algae are involving in symbiosis with bacteria in various ecosystems [3].…”

“…Algae have critical functions of energy cycle in nature ecosystem as well as in human society, and their biomass is widely applied for the production of pharmaceutics, food, bioactive compounds and bioenergy application [2]. Sustainable energy production represents one of the most important issues of the 21st century, and plant-based biofuel offers a significant promise.…”

“…Nowadays, many studies have been conducted on biomass to provide a source of biofuel to reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels [7]. Among all the potential alternatives of energy crops, microalgae growth rate is the highest [2,6]; conventional terrestrial plants are relatively inefficient in capturing and converting less than 0.5% of the solar energy received [2,4,5] in contrast, the photosynthetic efficiency of microalgae can exceed 10% potentially [5,6]. Because of higher light conversion efficiency, algae biofuel production requires significantly less land area than plant-based, even agricultural crop-based biofuel systems.…”

“…Since the algae can be one of the most important crops with efficient energy conversion and a significant niche of food web structure in ponds, lakes and reservoir [2,4].…”

“…without any extra CO 2 adding, (2) environmental advantages for water quality improvement [1,4,5] without further water contaminations, (3) ecological sustainability promotion from the cooperation of watershed management with the symbiosis algal biomass system with energy conversion, greenhouse gas CO 2 sequestration, etc [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Surprisingly, the existing literature is lacking information describing the microalgal growth potential of 'natural media' of the untreated/unfractionated water samples from natural ecosystems and the noticeable absence of reports describing the efficacy of unsupplemented natural water as a medium to produce algal biomass.…”