| Natural Swimming Pools (NSP's) are designed to use the natural water purification processes that are typically found in aquatic environments and wetlands. Currently, there is little research that explains the intricacies of these purification processes in context to NSP's. Building these pools without understanding the biological, ecological and chemical processes creates questions of systems' effectiveness, maintenance, and longevity. A comparative analysis of the literature combined with key informant interviews assesses similarities and differences among microbial activity, water quality and chemistry, nutrient uptake, algae, and substrate design. These topics are compared and analyzed in context to the systems that occur in natural and engineered wetlands and those that are present in NSP's. Through these comparisons a combined list of recommendations and strategies for each of the research areas was generated. A planting design manual based on these recommendations that addresses each of the research topics is presented as a synthetic summary. |
