Environmental soil quality index and indicators for a coal mining soil

Abstract

Abstract. Assessment of soil quality is one of the key parameters for evaluation of environmental contamination in the mining ecosystem. To investigate the effect of coal mining on soil quality, opencast and underground mining sites were selected in the Raniganj Coafield area, India. The physical, chemical, biological parameters, heavy metals, and PAHs contents of the soils were evaluated. Soil dehydrogenase (+79%) and fluorescein (+32%) activities were significantly higher in underground mine (UGM) soil, whereas peroxidase activity (+57%) was higher in opencast mine (OCM) soil. Content of As, Be, Co, Cr, Cu, Mn, Ni, and Pb was significantly higher in OCM soil, whereas, Cd was higher in UGM. In general, the PAHs contents were higher in UGM soils probably due to the natural coal burning in these sites. The observed values for the above properties were converted into a unit less score (0–1.00) and the scores were integrated into environmental soil quality index (ESQI). In the unscreened index (ESQI-1) all the soil parameters were included and the results showed that the quality of the soil was better for UGM (0.539) than the OCM (0.511) soils. Principal component analysis was employed to derive ESQI-2 and accordingly, total PAHs, loss on ignition, bulk density, Be, Co, Cr, Ni, Pb, and microbial quotient (respiration: microbial biomass ratio) were found to be the most critical properties. The ESQI-2 was also higher for soils near UGM (+10.1%). The proposed ESQI may be employed to monitor soil quality changes due to anthropogenic interventions.

A review on effective soil health bio-indicators for ecosystem restoration and sustainability

“…In another study, acidophilic bacteria were identified after 16S-rRNA profiling of bacterial community from extremely and moderately acidic lead-zinc mine tailing samples. A study from an Indian mine located at Ranigunj coalfields, dealt with environmental soil quality index, screened the bio-indicators, and differentiated their behaviors at underground mine (better dehydrogenase and fluorescein activities) and open cast mine soils (peroxidase activity) (Masto et al, 2015 ).…”

Assessment on Environmental Quality Management of Coal Stockpile for Environmental Sustainability

“…The monitoring activities on spontaneous coal combustion at the Tarahan port unit of PT Bukit Asam for the August 2020 period, are shown in Table 3. However, soil quality assessment is one of the key parameters for evaluating a contaminated mining environment [39]. This is because plants needs to assimilate nutrients from quality soil, in order to complete their vegetative and reproductive life cycle.…”

“…Similarly, the impact of CO 2 emissions as air pollutants from coal-red power plants, contributed to environmental problems [21,[24][25][26]. Meanwhile, other potential impact emerged from the use of fossil fuels in large quantities, which is likely to result in health deterioration of living things [18, 19,[27][28][29], such as noise kebisingan [2,30], spontaneous combustion [9,10,31-34] and a decrease in soil quality [35][36][37][38][39][40]. These impacts occurred in an attempt to secure more energy, food, and infrastructure.…”

The Assesment of Physical Variables of the Soil Quality Index in the Coal Mine Spoil Depends

“…The Assesment of Physical Variables of the Soil Quality Index in the Coal Mine Spoil the infiltration of precipitation water, as well as decreases the rate of run-off and water erosion (Barthes and Roose 2002, Singh and Khera 2009, Asgarzadeh et al 2010, Masto et al 2015.…”