Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Microbial Community Development in an Ecological Wastewater Treatment System written by Marissa Hartleb and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecological approaches to wastewater treatment may offer many advantages over conventional methods by virtue of their low energy and chemical usage as well as their potential to generate significant quantities of beneficial biomass byproducts; however, relatively little is known about the development of the microbial and chemical conditions that lead to high treatment efficiencies. Analysis of their development is necessary to enable broader and more consistent application. The purpose of this study was to examine microbial community development during the start-up and stabilization of a pilot-scale ecological wastewater treatment plant (Eco-Machine), as well as to analyze potential relationships between various water quality indicators and the microbial communities. This study is the first to analyze the spatial and temporal development of microbial communities in an Eco-Machine. Both location within the system and total run/development time substantially affected the clustering/ordination of the microbial communities present. Note that the true time factor has not been separated from seasonal effects or changes in the influent itself; all these factors are components of time in this study. Location had a linear effect, while time had a unimodal effect. The location effect suggests that analyzing multiple tanks at a treatment plant may give a much more complete view rather than selecting a single oxic tank as has often been done. While some community members are likely prevalent or at least present in the different tanks due to hydraulic connectivity, variations in nutrient levels and other biochemical factors may cause substantial differences throughout the system. There may have been disturbance between 2013 and 2015 which caused the unimodal effect, making continued monitoring ideal to determine if it is truly inherently unimodal. Additionally, lower fungal diversity corresponded to higher prokaryotic (refered to largely at the OTU, operational taxonomic unit, similar to species in macroecology) diversity. Both OTU and SH (species hypothesis, fungi specific) diversity was greatest early in the system, suggesting aivsmaller subset of taxa dominate the rest of the system due to competitive advantage. Generalwater quality appeared to be most improved in the least OTU-diverse year (2015), suggesting thatdiversity and performance are not directly related, but instead have a unimodal relationship. Theperformance of the Eco-Machine compared well to conventional systems, but as such a studydoes not appear to have been done on conventional plants, a direct comparison of communityspatial and temporal performance is unavailable.