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The determination of desirable and nuisance plant levels in streams

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Abstract

To cope with luxuriant plant growth in the streams of southern Ontario, an approach to determine the desirable and nuisance plant levels was proposed.

With a more intensive analysis of the assimilation efficiency of plant communities, which includes the fractionation of community respiration as well as compensation for the plant self-shading effect, the plant biomass of all species component expressed as chlorophyll a can be estimated from the modified growth equation, where B is the biomass, Pmax is the photosynthetic growth rate at light saturation, A is the assimilation number and S is the plant shading coefficient. Once comparable biomass values are available, a desirable plant level relative to specified environmental standards can be determined.

For instance, to meet the minimum dissolved oxygen criteria of 5 ppm, the desirable and the nuisance crop levels in the North Thames River, Ontario, were found to be 0.15 and 0.75 g chla/m2 respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Limnology and Toxicity Section, Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Water Resources Branch, Resources Road, Box 213, Rexdale, M9W 5L1

    S. L. Wong & B. Clark

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  1. S. L. Wong
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  2. B. Clark
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Wong, S.L., Clark, B. The determination of desirable and nuisance plant levels in streams. Hydrobiologia 63, 223–230 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00023626

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00023626

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