Ecological network analysis to assess the restoration success of disturbed mine soil in Zoucheng, China

Abstract

Understanding the interactions among soil microbial species and how they respond to land reclamation is essential to evaluate the success of ecological restoration actions in disturbed mine soil. In this study, we strived to reveal the interactions among soil bacterial communities along the reclamation timeline of a coal mine in Zoucheng, China. To do so, we investigated changes in the composition of soil bacterial over time and constructed molecular ecological networks (i.e., microbial network) following mining soil reclamation into agricultural land. The relationships between microbial networks and selected soil attributes (i.e., soil pH, electric conductivity, organic matter, soil nutrients and enzymatic activities) were also analyzed. The results showed that the composition of soil bacteria changed significantly along the reclamation timeline. The microbial network profile revealed that Acidobacteria, Planctomycetes and Proteobacteria were the key microbial populations. Soil pH, soil organic matter content, soil dehydrogenase and urease activities were significantly correlated (0.001 ≤ p < 0.05) with the microbial network structure, suggesting that the microbial networks found influenced the provision of relevant soil ecological functions after reclamation. The variation in complexity of the microbial networks along the reclamation timeline revealed that microbial development was promoted by the shift in land use from mining into agriculture. Overall, our findings shed light on how soil microbial communities and networks change following mine reclamation into agricultural land. The results presented herein will undoubtedly aid in the establishment of success indicators of ecological restoration activities in disturbed mining soil.

Response of Soil Fertility and Bacterial Community Composition to Vegetation Species in a Coal Mining Subsidence Area: A Survey After 20-Year Reclamation

“…For the subsoil, Rokubacteria was positively correlated with pH, while Chloroflexi and Acidobacteria were positively correlated with AN, SOM, AP, TC, AK, and TN. These results suggested soil pH was a key driving factor for bacterial community structure (Ma et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2021), and further confirmed that soil nutrients can significantly influence soil bacterial communities in different reclamation areas (Wan and He, 2020).…”

“…For instance, coal consumption in China accounted for 56.8% of the total energy consumption in 2020 (Hu et al, 2022), and coal consumption will continue to grow by 3.4% in the next 20 years (Yu et al, 2022). The extensive exploitation of coal resources has caused serious environmental and social problems including land subsidence, land damage, and poor harvest (Wang et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2021). In high groundwater level areas, coal mining always resulted in land subsidence and changed terrestrial to aquatic ecosystems (Ma et al, 2021).…”

“…The extensive exploitation of coal resources has caused serious environmental and social problems including land subsidence, land damage, and poor harvest (Wang et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2021). In high groundwater level areas, coal mining always resulted in land subsidence and changed terrestrial to aquatic ecosystems (Ma et al, 2021). Such dramatic environmental changes have destroyed agricultural lands and threatened the safe production of crops and the survival of local residents.…”

“…Soil microbial communities are critical to organic matter decomposition, nutrient cycling, long-term ecosystem stability and revegetation (Lehmann et al, 2011;Chen et al, 2017;Sun et al, 2019), and it is considered as an important indicator for the ecological restoration effect in coal mining subsidence area (Xu et al, 2019;Yuan et al, 2021). Natural succession of reclamation areas is a slow biogeochemical process and needs a long term before reaching a stable state (Ma et al, 2021). However, most studies about ecological restoration concentrated on a relatively short time (1-15 years) (Liu et al, 2018;Ma et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2020), and few studies were available on the evaluation of soil fertility and microbiome composition in reclamation areas.…”

A Remote-Sensing Ecological Index Approach for Restoration Assessment of Rare-Earth Elements Mining

“…This area has a good ecological foundation and is located in the less affected natural mountainous area to the north of the mining area, so the ecological spontaneous succession is faster after the mine stops mining. Agricultural means reduce the secondary damage to the site caused by guest soil restoration and chemical improvement [ 50 ] and at the same time promote local farmers to increase income while ecological restoration, taking into account the production value of the site, which provides a strong long-term drive for ecological restoration in the region and promotes the ecological transformation of the regional economic and social production methods and sustainable development [ 51 ].…”