Department of Natural Resource Sciences, Thompson Rivers University, 805 TRU Way, Kamloops, BC V2C 0C8, Canada.
Department of Biological Sciences, Thompson Rivers University, 805 TRU Way, Kamloops, BC V2C 0C8, Canada.
Sci Total Environ. 2024 Apr 10;920:170996. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170996. Epub 2024 Feb 17.
Mine reclamation historically focuses on enhancing plant coverage to improve below and aboveground ecology. However, there is a great need to study the role of soil microorganisms in mine reclamation, particularly long-term studies that track the succession of microbial communities. Here, we investigate the trajectory of microbial communities of mining sites reclaimed between three and 26 years. We used high-throughput amplicon sequencing to characterize the bacterial and fungal communities. We quantified how similar the reclaimed sites were to unmined, undisturbed reference sites and explored the trajectory of microbial communities along the reclamation chronosequence. We also examined the ecological processes that shape the assembly of bacterial communities. Finally, we investigated the functional potential of the microbial communities through metagenomic sequencing. Our results reveal that the reclamation age significantly impacted the community compositions of bacterial and fungal communities. As the reclamation age increases, bacterial and fungal communities become similar to the unmined, undisturbed reference site, suggesting a favorable succession in microbial communities. The bacterial community assembly was also significantly impacted by reclamation age and was primarily driven by stochastic processes, indicating a lesser influence of environmental properties on the bacterial community. Furthermore, our read-based metagenomic analysis showed that the microbial communities' functional potential increasingly became similar to the reference sites. Additionally, we found that the plant richness increased with the reclamation age. Overall, our study shows that both above- and belowground ecological properties of reclaimed mine sites trend towards undisturbed sites with increasing reclamation age. Further, it demonstrates the importance of microbial genomics in tracking the trajectory of ecosystem reclamation.
矿山复垦历史上侧重于提高植物覆盖率，以改善地下和地上生态。然而，非常有必要研究土壤微生物在矿山复垦中的作用，特别是需要进行长期研究，以跟踪微生物群落的演替。在这里，我们研究了复垦 3 至 26 年的矿山场地的微生物群落轨迹。我们使用高通量扩增子测序来描述细菌和真菌群落。我们量化了复垦地点与未开采、未受干扰的参考地点的相似程度，并探索了微生物群落沿着复垦时间序列的轨迹。我们还研究了塑造细菌群落组装的生态过程。最后，我们通过宏基因组测序研究了微生物群落的功能潜力。我们的结果表明，复垦年龄显著影响了细菌和真菌群落的组成。随着复垦年龄的增加，细菌和真菌群落变得与未开采、未受干扰的参考地点相似，表明微生物群落的演替良好。细菌群落的组装也受到复垦年龄的显著影响，主要由随机过程驱动，这表明环境特性对细菌群落的影响较小。此外，我们基于读取的宏基因组分析表明，微生物群落的功能潜力越来越与参考地点相似。此外，我们发现植物丰富度随复垦年龄的增加而增加。总体而言，我们的研究表明，随着复垦年龄的增加，复垦矿山场地的地上和地下生态特性都趋向于未受干扰的地点。此外，它证明了微生物基因组学在跟踪生态系统复垦轨迹方面的重要性。
