Response of soil environment factors and microbial communities to phytoremediation with Robinia pseudoacacia in an open‐cut magnesite mine

Abstract

Overexploitation of magnesium has caused serious environmental pollution, and the ecological restoration of magnesite mines has attracted increasing attention in China. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of phytoremediation with Robinia pseudoacacia (RP) on soil quality and microbial communities in magnesite mines. Here, soil samples were collected from restored areas (R. pseudoacacia), natural forest (NF), and unrestored areas (CK), and the soil microbial communities were assessed by Illumina high-throughput sequencing. Phytoremediation with R. pseudoacacia could alleviate soil alkalization and contribute to the accumulation of soil nutrients. A total of 531,329 effective 16S rRNA and 596,344 valid Internal Transcribed Spacer rRNA gene sequences were obtained, which were classified into 30 bacterial and 12 fungal phyla. The predominant bacterial and fungal phyla were Proteobacteria and Ascomycota, respectively. Bacterial diversity indices of RP were higher than those of the CK, both of which were lower than those in the NF site. While, fungal Chao1 and ACE (abundance-based coverage estimator) indices of RP were higher than those of the CK and even surpassed those in the NF site. Soil microbial communities significantly differed among different treatments, and the effects of soil factors on microbial communities were comprehensive and not determined by a single factor. Generally, these results indicated that phytoremediation with R. pseudoacacia could effectively improve the soil environment of the abandoned magnesium mine, which provide useful insights and practical references for the suitable species that would be planted on magnesite mine for restoration.

Characterization of ectomycorrhizal fungal communities associated with tree species on an iron tailings deposit undergoing restoration

“…Amplification of the nuclear ribosomal DNA from the ITS1 region was performed using the fungal specific primer pair ITS1F and ITS2 (Caban et al 2018 ; Nottingham et al 2018 ). The first PCR (25 μl total per reaction) contained 2 μl of dNTPs (2.5 mM), 2 μl of DNA template (40–50 ng), 8.75 μl of ddH 2 O, 1 μl (10 uM) of forward and reverse primer, respectively; 5 μl of Q5 reaction buffer (5 ×) and Q5 High-Fidelity GC buffer (5 ×), severally; 0.25 μl (5 U/μl) of Q5 High-Fidelity DNA Polymerase (Deng et al 2020b ). Following the initial denaturation at 95 °C for 5 min; 23 cycles of 95 °C for 30 s, 58 °C for 90 s, 72 °C for 4.5 min; then, final elongation at 72 °C for 10 min.…”

“…In previous studies, many herbaceous (Mahdavian et al 2017 ; Heckenroth et al 2016 ) and woody plants (Luo et al 2019 ; Siebielec et al 2018 ), such as Paspalum densum , Setaria parviflora (Rios et al 2017 ; Araújo et al 2015 ), and Robinia Pseudoacacia (Deng et al 2020a , b ), have proven to be potential candidates for revegetating iron ore–mined areas. In addition, the integration of soil biological indicators with chemical and physical indicators is an important factor in the evaluation of soil quality and the recovery process (Silva et al 2018 ).…”

“…In addition, the integration of soil biological indicators with chemical and physical indicators is an important factor in the evaluation of soil quality and the recovery process (Silva et al 2018 ). A number of mine-tailing reclamation findings have emphasized a strong association between the establishment of plant community and the abundance and composition of soil microbiota (Deng et al 2020a ; Mendez et al 2008 ), mainly focusing on the bacteria (Deng et al 2020a ), fungi (Deng et al 2020b ), and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF)(Wu et al 2020 ; Prado et al 2019 ). However, the links between plant taxa succession and their associated ectomycorrhizal fungal communities remain to be addressed.…”

Assessment for combined phytoremediation and biomass production on a moderately contaminated soil

“…heat generation or bioproducts) (Jiang et al 2015(Jiang et al , 2022Ciadamidaro et al 2019;Padoan et al 2020;Moreira et al 2021;Guidi Nissim and Labrecque 2021). Tree species such as poplar, willow, eucalyptus, black locust and alder have shown to be capable of meeting the afore-mentioned criteria in a number of studies (Lorenc-Plucińska et al 2013;ADEME and Bert 2016;McIntosh et al 2016;Foulon et al 2016;ADEME et al 2017;Chalot et al 2020;Deng et al 2020).…”

“…The choice of these two species was based on (i) their ability to grow under short rotation coppicing and being suitable for heatgeneration purposes (Uri et al 2002;Grünewald et al 2009;Mizaras et al 2011;Alesso et al 2021;Rebola-Lichtenberg et al 2021), and (ii) their ability to grow in a degraded environment (e.g. pioneer species capable of atmospheric N2 fixation via symbiotic association (Uri et al 2002(Uri et al , 2011Gentili 2003;Rice et al 2004;Aosaar et al 2012;Marron et al 2018), tolerance of contamination (Krzaklewski et al 2012;Lorenc-Plucińska et al 2013;Fan et al 2018;Woś et al 2020;Deng et al 2020;Băbău et al…”