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Plant Requirements
From Oscomak
Hopefully, most plant nutrients can be recycled; but perfect retension is impossible. Therefore, for a habitat to be truly self-sufficient the nutrients would need to be replaced eventually using local resources. The presence of these elements, how they can be extracted, and how they can be processed should be researched. For rare elements that are used for other applications, the effect of a less than optimal concentrations should be researched. Knowing the required nutrients is also necessary for designing a Hydroponics System. All nutrients are usually in ionic inorganic form.
Ideally, each species of plant should have either a table or graph showing how each requirement effects the level of production, as well as other affected variables, in order to weigh resource conservation with productivity.
From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_nutrition
Major nutrients include:
- C = Carbon 450,000 ppm
- H = Hydrogen 60,000 ppm
- O = Oxygen 450,000 ppm
- P = Phosphorus 2,000 ppm
- K = Potassium 10,000 ppm
- N = Nitrogen 15,000 ppm
- S = Sulfur 1,000 ppm
- Ca = Calcium 5,000 ppm
- Mg = Magnesium 2000 ppm
Minor Nutrients:
- Fe = Iron 100 ppm
- Mo = Molybdenum 0.1 ppm
- B = Boron 20 ppm
- Cu = Copper 6 ppm
- Mn = Manganese 50 ppm
- Zn = Zinc 20 ppm
- Cl = Chlorine 100 ppm
Gas Requirements
Research needs to be done to determine the ideal concentrations of gaseous substances. Also the optimal pressure should be found for each plant.
It should be noted that gaseous oxygen is required in somewhat large concentration for plants to efficiently undergo Aerobic Cellular Respiration.

