Biodiversity of Phytoplankton in a Tropical Lake of South India

Freshwater ecosystems provide vital resources for humans and are the sole habitat for an extraordinary rich endemic and sensitive biota (Jasmine et al., 2013). The water quality parameters of an aquatic environment greatly influence its productivity (Wetzel, 1983; Ahmed and Singh, 1989; Bais and Agarwal, 1990). Both the qualitative and quantitative abundance of plankton in a water body are of great importance for imposing sustainable management policies as they vary from location to location and aquatic systems within the same location even with similar ecological conditions (Boyd, 1982). The primary productivity of different water bodies have been widely investigated to assess the fish production potentialities of a water body and to formulate sustainable fishery management practices.