A hydroponic plants and biofilm combined treatment system efficiently purified wastewater from cold flowing water aquaculture

Recently, more and more cold flowing water aquaculture has been adopted, but its wastewater treatment is always ignored, which causes great pressure on the environment. In this study, a compound in-situ treatment system that applied hydroponic plants and biofilm was constructed to treat the wastewater produced by cold flowing water culture of sturgeon. The removal efficiency of the nutrients from culture and the microbial composition in water and biofilm were tested, the correlation between the water quality indexes and bacterium was analyzed, and the abundance of nitrogen and phosphorus cycling genes was quantified. The results show that the system respectively achieved 90%, 100%, 100%, 100% and 48% removal efficiency of NH4+-N, NO3--N, TN, TP and COD which were produced by experimental sturgeon culture. Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa var. chinensis) and water dropwort (Oenanthe javanica) showed obvious growth in the four plants, which contributed to the removal of nutrients from wastewater. Besides, in the biofilm, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Verrucomicrobia became the top three dominant flora at the phylum level, and Flavobacterium, Rhodoferax, Sphaerotilus and Chitinimonas became the top four dominant flora at the genus level, which promoted the removal of nitrogen in the wastewater. The FAPROTAX analysis result shows that the highest functions within the carbon and nitrogen metabolisms were significantly identified in the biofilm, such as chemoheterotrophy, aerobic chemoheterotrophy and nitrate reduction. Further, the abundance of denitrifying genes (narG and napA) was higher than the nitrifying related genes (nxrB and amoA), indicating the more active denitrifying process. In summary, the compound in-situ treatment system efficiently removed nutrients from cold flowing water aquaculture. And the combined purification of hydroponic plants and biofilm which is rich in denitrifying bacterium plays an essential role in this process.