What does a reptile UVB light do to plants?

[onlywei]

I have a 55 gallon where I have a DIY basking area over half the tank. Above that, I am shining a UVB bulb for my turtles. The basking area is made of egg-crate so more than 90% of the light can still go through. Is this considered high light, low light, or what kind of light? What effect should I expect for it to have on my plants, which are mostly Java Fern and Anubias?

[Cory]

Typically this would be low light if it's a t8 bulb. I'm not specifically how well it does for plants gut in general you can grow low light plants. However lots of turtles chomp on plants so you need to make a cage often times to prevent that. 

[onlywei]

Hi @Cory, thanks for the reply. I wasn't thinking "low" light because it looks quite bright to me. I was even afraid that the reason the Java Fern Windelov in the picture below is melting may be because of too much light. Do you think I can rule that out and start exploring other possibilities? The basking light is on 12 hours a day (it's the one to the left, the one to the right is a heat lamp that produces no visible light).

Here is an amazon link to the specific UVB bulb I have.

Also, my Eastern Painted turtle nibbled on Java Fern a little bit when I first added some, but I think it has since figured out that they don't taste good.

[Steph’s Fish and Plants]

I’m not quite sure how well plants are able to take in and use the light that’s produced by UVB bulbs bc of where it is on the spectrum. In the reptile hobby people with bioactive systems that grow plants usually use some sort of grow light in addition to uvb and basking bulbs. I would recommend someone who has a lot of experience growing plants with reptiles other than turtles in a bioactive environment or, say, a chameleon cage, and see what they use for their plants. I have a bioactive vivarium myself and I don’t have UVB (my animal doesn’t need it), the lighting for it is a finnex stingray 2.0 and a finnex stingray 1.0.