• Korean Journal of Environmental Biology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.183-194
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• 2001

As researchers can modify environmental factors to fit the purpose of an experiment in monitoring marine ecosystem using enclosed experimental ecosystems, which is a strong advantage of them, mid-sized enclosed experimental ecosystems (mesocosm) are widely used in the world in basic ecology such as trophodynamic study and applied ecology such as the toxicity test of various chemicals and monitoring of ecosystem changes against marine pollution. Application of the mesocosm in the field has a merit to get more reliable result than that from the experiment in the laboratory. However, the result from the mesocosm study in marine ecosystem is very limited in Korea. Mesocosms which had been used in the marine ecological studies in both foreign countries and Korea were summarized, and application of them to the future study in various research field was suggested in this review paper.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Biology
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.403-411
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• 2015

To understand differences of environmental factors and planktonic communities in closed (CS) versus open (OS) enclosed experimental systems, we performed a study on a 100-L indoor-type artificial marine microcosm. For environmental factors, including water temperature, dissolved inorganic phosphorus, and dissolved silica, there were no significant differences between CS and OS; however, salinity was higher in CS than that of OS due to the evaporation effect. The concentration of dissolved oxygen and dissolved inorganic nitrogen was lower in CS than in OS. The abundance of phytoplankton was lower in CS than in OS. However, abundance of autotrophic nanoflagellates and heterotrophic bacteria varied inversely with that of phytoplankton abundances. In particular, the abundance of heterotrophic nanoflagellates and ciliates increased with bacterial growth after a time lag. Therefore, environmental factors and planktonic communities in CS gradually changed over time and characterized a different artificial ecosystem than in OS.