Over the past few decades, a large body of research has examined how biodiversity loss infl uences the functioning of ecosystems, as well as the cascading impacts on the goods and services ecosystems provide to humanity. Th e relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functions quantifi ed in prior experiments suggests that initial losses of biodiversity have relatively small impacts on pr...

rocky shores are one of the most important habitats of marine environment in coastal areas. they host marine organisms including seaweeds because of existence of strong and stable substrate for their growths. intertidal rocky shores are a prominent feature on coastal areas of qeshm island located at the northern part of strait of hormuz. in order to study biomass of seaweeds on rocky intertidal...

The biomass of Vaucheria sessilis forms algal mats in many freshwaters. There is a need to find the method of algal biomass utilization. Vaucheria sessilis is a rich source of micro- and macronutrients and can be used as a soil amendment. In the paper, the elemental composition of enriched, via bioaccumulation process, macroalga was investigated. For this purpose, two independent techniques wer...

BACKGROUND Algal biofilm reactors represent a promising cultivation system that can economically produce biomass without the need for expensive harvesting operations. A critical component of algal biofilm systems is the material used for attachment. This research reports a comprehensive study of the effects of material surface physico-chemical properties, the surface texture, and their interact...

This thesis describes research done on two novel algae cultivation systems. The first system was an attached algal growth system to facilitate biomass harvest with improved biomass yield. In the attached system, algal cells were grown on the surface of a material rotating between the nutrient-rich liquid phase and the carbon dioxide-rich gaseous phase. The algal cells from the attached growth s...

Energy transfer in microbial food webs is partly quantified by the relationship between bacterial and algal biomass. Tight spatial relationships suggest active bacterial assimilation of dissolved photosynthate in temperate marine and fresh waters. However, studies in the Antarctic suggest that bacterial biomass generation from algal-derived dissolved organic matter is highly variable across sea...

Lipid recovery and purification from microalgal cells continues to be a significant bottleneck in biodiesel production due to high costs involved and a high energy demand. Therefore, there is a considerable necessity to develop an extraction method which meets the essential requirements of being safe, cost-effective, robust, efficient, selective, environmentally friendly, feasible for large-sca...

Natural ecosystems can show regular spatial vegetation patterns, which develop from small-scale ecological interactions. Some studies suggest that grazers can play a major role in controlling vegetation distribution in ecosystems with regular vegetation patterns, but the distribution of grazers and the effects of grazing on vegetation in spatially patterned ecosystems remains poorly understood....