Francis Emmanuel Awortwi

Phytoplankton Variability of Lake Bosomtwe (Ghana): Species Composition, Biomass, and Primary Productivity Francis Emmanuel Awortwi

Phytoplanktons are important components of the biological communities of lakes, rivers, as well as oceans and are important in the assessment of the structure of trophic relationships, productivity, water quality, and past environmental conditions. In tropical African lakes like Lake Bosomtwe (Ghana) however, there is often inadequate research on these important organisms compared to fisheries. This book provides extensive primary research on the phytoplankton of Lake Bosomtwe, a tropical closed basin lake in Ghana, West Africa. The species composition, the variability of the wet weight biomass and productivity of the phytoplankton has been assessed on spatio-temporal scales based on two years of bimonthly sampling, making it one of the few tropical lakes with continuous data collected in short intervals of time. Chlorophyll a - a surrogate of phytoplankton biomass, community respiration, growth rates, and total phosphorus were also assessed. This book thus hopefully helps to reveal more and validate some of the already known facts about the phytoplankton of tropical African lakes and will be useful to researchers, lecturers and students in aquatic ecology of phytoplankton.