Exploring the Applications of Lemna minor in Animal Feed: A Review Assisted by Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The work aims to apply cheap and widely accessible tools based on artificial intelligence to analyze, group, and categorize a large amount of available research literature (from a massive bibliographic search) on the use of Lemna minor for animal feed, not only comprehensively and objectively, but also in a more effective and less time-consuming way. In addition, a comprehensive and critical summary was conducted to highlight recent applications of L. minor in animal feed. The Scopus database was used for the original bibliographic search. Then, a newly developed online and freely available tool called “Jupyter Notebook on Google Colab” was applied to cluster the large volume of bibliographic data (1432 papers) obtained in the basic search, which allowed their reduction until only 148 papers. These papers were reviewed in a traditional way obtaining relevant information about L. minor production, nutritional value, composition, and its application as animal feed. In this sense, the most successful applications were for fish and poultry feeding, reaching levels of inclusion of 15–20% in fish and 5–15% in poultry. It is of great interest because of the expected increase in prices of conventional sources of protein for animal feed.