Urban Pond Ecosystems: Preservation and Management Through Phytoremediation

Life is impossible without freshwater as it is significantly important for all living creatures on earth. The natural built-up of nutrients in freshwater bodies is an extremely time-consuming process but human interferences have enhanced the rate of contaminating the pond and lake ecosystems with N and P plenty of times than natural cause. Large quantities of untreated effluents from industrial and domestic sector are directly discharged into adjacent recipient freshwater environs (ponds and lakes), which manifolds the concentration of concerned nutrients into these freshwater ecosystems. There is no limit pertaining to the treatment techniques availability, but they are either insufficient or least effective for removing the nuisance contaminates from the wastewaters. Besides, these techniques have plenty of environment related issues, in other words conventional remediation techniques pose threats to the freshwater environs and required high energy and cost for establishment. Employing naturally growing plants in disturbed aquatic environs has been observed a viable technique to clean up the nuisance nutrients and toxic pollutants. Phytoremediants scavenge the harmful substances (nutrients and heavy metals) from disturbed surface waters have recently been explored as substitute to conventional methods.