Closed man-made ecosystems (CES) are laboratory-constructed ecological systems with well defined parameters which are more or less sealed from the natural environment and which are valuable tools for basic ecosystem research, offering the possibility of comprehensive analysis of clearly defined ecosystems which can contribute to the better understanding of the much more complex natural ones. They may be developed to production systems which can be linked to life-support systems for terrestrial extreme biotope habitats.

Moreover, they can contribute to innovative approaches for food production, atmosphere and water regeneration for commercial utilisation. CES for higher plants and algae are well established in research and the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Biophysics (IBP) demonstrated with the BIOS-3 system the possibility of maintaining three humans in a closed environment with local life support on the base of higher plants solely or in combination with microalgae.

CES research with animals is scarce. The Bochum and Moscow groups have developed aquatic CES which have been successfully tested for more than 14 days and the CCEO created a closed equilibrated biological aquatic system CEBAS with fishes and higher plants. The IMBP aquatic system is still a dead-end system because of its limited life-span. The CEBAS system is only a partial CES because of the import of fish food. The BIOS system is only able to produce plant biomass part of which is not edible for humans.

There are four main scientific targets: to study the turnover of basic biogenic elements in a closed ecosystem to determine conditions of closure for aquatic ecosystems of different degrees of complexity and find ways to control turnover intensity; to use theoretical and experimental evidence to determine conditions for existence of a self-sustained closed ecosystem based on algal-bacterial community, including fish. Up-to-date equipment to cultivate algal-bacterial communities available at IBP and fish-maintaining modules available at IMBP as well as experience to integrate experimentally different trophic levels form the basis to create a three-component algae-bacteria-fish system with maximum closure. Introduction of the three-component artificial ecosystem into BIOS can be optimised both to produce animal protein and to regenerate water and atmosphere.