Saprobisation

As Saprobisierung refers to a form of water pollution (caused by humans) by anthropogenic increase in Saprobie . It occurs in all types and forms of water, but the term saprobic is almost only used for stagnant water such as lakes , or for bays and sections of inland seas . The opposite of saprobic treatment is (biological) self-cleaning .

In contrast to eutrophication, the entry of nutrient salts into a body of water, saprobization is the influx of organic nutrients ( biomass ). This is mineralized by specialized organisms, the destructors , which take care of the breakdown of the organic substances, using oxygen . As a result, the oxygen content decreases in the deeper water areas, where the organic matter normally sinks. In deeper waters, where there is hardly any light entering the deep zone, with the help of which oxygen could be produced by the producers as part of photosynthesis , the oxygen content can drop to zero ( anoxia ). The lack of oxygen usually leads to the fact that obligatory aerobes , i.e. living beings that absolutely need oxygen to survive, disappear. Furthermore, anaerobic dissimilation (i.e. degradation in the absence of oxygen) of the nutrients can lead to the formation of toxic substances such as H ₂ S or NH ₃ , which are distributed when the water is mixed and can therefore also be dangerous for living beings in other layers.

While saprobation is usually a burden for the water and its usability by humans and is therefore undesirable, an artificial saprobation is carried out as a remediation method (controlled saprobation) for a special type of water, the remaining holes in lignite opencast mines. These waters are both extremely acidic and poor in nutrients ( oligotrophic ) and therefore hostile to life and can only be colonized by a few, specialized organisms. The supply of nutrients, especially phosphates , via biomass has the advantage that these are not immediately inorganically precipitated again via the abundant iron ions and thus fixed (for the mechanism, see phosphate trap ).

See also

• Lake ecosystem

swell

• Günther Nausch, Oceanography Section, Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde: The Baltic Sea - A small sea with big problems
• Lothar Kalbe: Limnic ecology. Springer-Verlag, 2013. ISBN 978-3-663-10671-5 . on page 157.
• Heinz Brauer: Handbook of environmental protection and environmental protection technology: Volume 5: Renovating environmental protection. Springer-Verlag, 2013. ISBN 978-3-642-59228-7 . therein section 3.2. Reasons for restructuring (written by H. Klapper).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Carsten Drebenstedt , Mahmut Kuyumcu: Brown coal refurbishment: basics, geotechnics, water management, fallow land, recultivation, marketing. Springer-Verlag, 2014. ISBN 978-3-642-16353-1 . P. 360.