A Study on Soil Bacterial Population in Steel Company and Some Related Area in Erbil City in Relation to Heavy Metal Pollution

Abstract

Pollution of the environment with toxic heavy metals is spreading throughout the world with industrial progress. Various industrial, agricultural and military operations have released huge amounts of toxic heavy metals into the environment with deleterious effects on soils, water and air (Sobolev and Begonia, 2008; Zhang, et al., 2014 and Ahmad, 2014). Soil contamination by heavy metals like chromium (Cr), nickel (Ni), mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb) and cupper (Cu) are consequently the most critical environmental problems as it poses significant impacts to the human health as well as the ecosystems (Octavia, 2013; Tamiru, et al., 2014 and Owolabi and Hekeu, 2014) because they cannot be naturally degraded like organic pollutants and they accumulate in different parts of the food chain (Šmejkalová, et al., 2014). Therefore; several studies have demonstrated that microbial parameters may be useful as indicators of changing soil condition caused by chemical pollution (Oliveira and Pampulha, 2006). Microorganisms are the first