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Tags:   CU Greenhouse Fern Aquatic Azolla

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Azolla is a tiny aquatic fern. It can double it's biomass in less than two days which can make it either an extremely invasive weed or very useful plant depending on the situation.

According to Wikipedia: Rice farmers used Azolla as a rice biofertilizer 1500 years ago. The earliest known written record of this practice is in a book written by Jia Ssu Hsieh (Jia Si Xue) in 540 A.D on The Art of Feeding the People (Chih Min Tao Shu). When rice paddies are flooded in the spring, they can be planted with Azolla, which then quickly multiplies to cover the water, suppressing weeds. The rotting plant material releases nitrogen into the water for the rice plants, providing up to nine tonnes of protein per hectare per year.

Azolla has also been proposed as a carbon sequestration modality. The proposal draws upon the hypothesized "Azolla event" that asserts that Azolla once covered the Arctic and then sank, permanently sequestering teratons of carbon and ending a warming event that reached 54–59 °F degrees warmer than twenty-first century averages.

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