The easy one first 
Reversed light cycle is just that - when one set of tanks has their lights go off, the others are coming on. One set has day 11 AM to 11pm, the other has day 11PM to 11AM. The dark cycle set feeds CO2 to the lighted set, the light set feeds O2 to the dark set, the 24-hour cycle is smoother. One set is fed mornings, one set is fed evenings - balance the load out.
Hook up with native or wild waters is never ever desirable - disease and other contamination can go both ways, and is rarely good, usually illegal.
But the setup can be handled as a series of refugia. A FO carnivore tank followed by a heavily planted tank, followed bt a daphnia tank (eat bacteria and other smallish beasties) and that followed by a wood shrimp tank (who sit in the incoming current harvesting the daphnia that wash over). I have a rainbow tank with lots of Java Moss , adjacent tanks are heavily planted and serve as Rainbow fry nurseries, many of which are carried in by the flow. You can say you are playing with a highly restricted and limited ecosystem - the plant tanks help produce the snails to feed the puffers (my main carnivores), while the plants are eating some of the puffer waste (but only some). It is fun and challenging - not that you will have a closed system, but that you are using some parts of the system to offset the needs from other parts of the system.
Reversed light cycle is just that - when one set of tanks has their lights go off, the others are coming on. One set has day 11 AM to 11pm, the other has day 11PM to 11AM. The dark cycle set feeds CO2 to the lighted set, the light set feeds O2 to the dark set, the 24-hour cycle is smoother. One set is fed mornings, one set is fed evenings - balance the load out.
Hook up with native or wild waters is never ever desirable - disease and other contamination can go both ways, and is rarely good, usually illegal.
But the setup can be handled as a series of refugia. A FO carnivore tank followed by a heavily planted tank, followed bt a daphnia tank (eat bacteria and other smallish beasties) and that followed by a wood shrimp tank (who sit in the incoming current harvesting the daphnia that wash over). I have a rainbow tank with lots of Java Moss , adjacent tanks are heavily planted and serve as Rainbow fry nurseries, many of which are carried in by the flow. You can say you are playing with a highly restricted and limited ecosystem - the plant tanks help produce the snails to feed the puffers (my main carnivores), while the plants are eating some of the puffer waste (but only some). It is fun and challenging - not that you will have a closed system, but that you are using some parts of the system to offset the needs from other parts of the system.
