Aquarium plant parameter table

How to read the columns

Each value is copied from the plant's own Tropica page, which defines its scales in help text: height is the average height in centimeters after two months in the tank, a medium light demand corresponds to 0.5 W of lighting per liter, and a medium CO2 need is 6–14 mg/L while a high need is approximately 15–25 mg/L^[2]. Tropica's fertilizer and CO2 guide uses different bands for its difficulty groups: about 10–15 mg/L for "Medium" plants and 15–30 mg/L for "Advanced" plants, and no added CO2 needed for "Easy" plants, though they do better with a little^[3]. The two Tropica pages do not use the same numbers, so treat the bands as rough guides rather than thresholds.

Watts per liter was a sensible yardstick for fluorescent tubes; it says little about modern LEDs, whose light output per watt varies widely. The light column is still useful for ranking plants against each other. For the units that do describe light at the leaf, see PAR, PPFD and DLI.

What the table shows at a glance

• 19 of the 27 plants are rated easy, 6 medium and 2 advanced.
• 18 combine low light, low CO2 and an easy rating: the group that suits a tank without injected CO2.
• 2 are rated as having a high CO2 need: Glossostigma elatinoides, Micranthemum callitrichoides 'Cuba'. None of them is rated easy.
• 6 rows have at least one rating that Tropica does not publish for that plant.