Does water temperature influence in microcystin production? A case study of Billings Reservoir, São Paulo, Brazil.

We investigated the relationship between some water quality parameters and microcystin, chlorophyll-a, and cyanobacteria in different conditions of water temperature. We also proposed to predict chlorophyll-a concentration in the Billings Reservoir using three machine learning techniques. Our results indicate that in the condition of higher water temperatures with high density of cyanobacteria, microcystin concentration can increase severely (>102 µg/L). Besides the magnitude observed in higher concentrations, in water temperatures above 25.3 °C (classified as high extreme event), higher frequencies of inadequate values of microcystin (87.5%), chlorophyll-a (70%), and cyanobacteria (82.5%) compared to cooler temperatures (<19.6 °C) were observed. The prediction of chlorophyll-a in Billings Reservoir presented good results (0.76 ≤ R2 ≤ 0.82; 0.17 ≤ RMSE≤0.20) using water temperature, total phosphorus, and cyanobacteria as predictors, with the best result using Support Vector Machine.

Chlorella vulgaris growth in different biodigested vinasse concentrations: biomass, pigments and final composition.

Vinasse, an effluent generated during sugar and alcohol production, has great potential for soil and water pollution; however, it can be treated, used in biomass production and reused in sugarcane plantations. Thus, this work uses different types of biodigested vinasse to produce more biomass. The effect is the removal of ammonia nitrogen quickly and the end of the exponential growth phase of microalgae at different levels from the sixth day of cultivation. Among the concentrations used, the use of 50% biodigested vinasse showed the highest biomass concentration (255 mg L-1) after 10 days of growth, coinciding with the end of ammoniacal nitrogen availability and stabilization of effluent color removal. The addition of biodigested vinasse also provides an increase in Chlorophyll a (5.33 mg L-1) and b (4.66 mg L-1) levels, obtained on the sixth day with 40% of vinasse, as well as protein (40.50%) with 50% effluent. Therefore, with the obtained results we noticed the variation of the biomass composition according to the vinasse concentration and increase of the pigment concentration in the presence of the effluent with higher nutrient concentration. Thus, the higher concentration of vinasse was more productive of the cultivation of Chlorella vulgaris.