Abstract
Most of this planet’s surface is water, and water is by far the most frequent limiting factor in achieving optimum photosynthetic efficiencies of terrestrial plants. Aquatic species thus start with a critical advantage over their land-based counterparts. Besides, the scale of any cultivation effort may be many times, even a few orders of magnitude, greater than on the land where the numerous competing uses for suitable land will always figure high. But as the following sections will show, serious obstacles cannot be avoided in cultivation of water plants either: the weediness of many freshwater macrophyta, difficulties in harvesting microalgae, nutritional deficits in surface waters, and environmental constraints make any aquaculture, and more so any energy cropping, a very challenging, far-from-inexpensive, and complex endeavor.
Alas for the lonely plant that grows beside the river bed,
While the mango-bird screams loud and long from the tall tree overhead!
—Wei Yingui Superseded (trans. H. A. Giles)
Floating duckweed!
a spider passes over it—
the water, calm.
—Murakami Kijō Haiku (trans. Makoto Veda)
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© 1983 Plenum Press, New York
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Smil, V. (1983). Aquatic Plants. In: Biomass Energies. Modern Perspectives in Energy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3691-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3691-4_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-3693-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-3691-4
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