Current diversity of aquatic macrophytes in nigerian freshwater ecosystem

Abstract

In Nigerian inland waters, eight aquatic plants have been incriminated as weeds. From the current study, the most prevalent of these weeds are water hyacinth and cattail plants. These aquatic weeds, once it invades a water body, not only disrupts the ecology of the systems but adversely affects the sociological, cultural and economic realities of the local communities within the area, especially the artisanal fisher folks. This paper showcases aquatic weeds distribution country wide based on its hydrological areas as well as their controlling methods. These methods, when employed in aquatic weed infested water bodies, will manifestly contribute to the success of approaches geared to solving aquatic weed problems.