The other issue of difference is that aquarist can control light intensity and duration/CO2.
For environmental management, how might you try and change the CO2 or light in a river or stream in the UK?
PO4, NO3, etc are pretty much the ONLY tools you have to work with. the othe rissue is restoring a natural system to the way it was, our systems are artificial for the most part. They have their own type of Ecology and management.
It's easier to change what we have done with nutrients, than try and modify the other things like CO2/light.
We seem to be slowly modifying the CO2 though as well!
In CA, N, not P is the typical limiting nutrients, same for the springs in Florida, N levels have increased 10X in the last 20 years and algae has increased. N or P, it can go either way, but the bottom line is to keep it out of the environment and use better management for agriculture and reduced carbon oxidation, N/P limited methods for larger scale systems, wetlands and weir like water runoff retention basins. Folks do not like to give up their agricultural lands for this type of thing. So there's a fight typically/legal political environmental amongst several groups or more typically.
We are good at this latter part in CA
Plenty of agriculture, fisheries, drinking water(too many people) and politics to go around and a very limited amount of water.
We also use the Diatom index for stream monitoring here in CA and the USA, a very typical method for measuring the trophic status and a good one. Aquarist can also use algae as a bioindicator for their ecosystems as well.
BBA: CO2
BGA: low NO3, poor filtration, cleaning etc needed
GSA: more PO4 , maybe low CO2
Hair algae: higher greens: slightly low CO2, too much light
Diatoms are typical only during the intial start up, too tasty to Otto and most other species.
I think Dusko's site gives it a good run done.
I've long used the algae are monitors and can tell what is going in a tank in a few seconds along with the plants if I see it in person. Algae do not lie, various ppm's etc can.
The problem is when we have lots of plants and other autortrophes, we still have high ppm's of nutrients, and weedy aquatic macrophytes, but no algae, then such indexes do not work well. We add more nutrients, we simply get more weeds, not algae.
This is typical for many sites in CA, Texas, Florida, LA, AL, etc.
Warmer lower shallow lakes, stream systems where there's weeds already.
I think wetland creation is the best way to remove and sequester the PO4.
Works well in semi tropical regions, but does little good in the winter in northern Europe.
Regards,
Tom Barr