Revegetation of artificial grassland improve soil organic and inorganic carbon and water of abandoned mine

Abstract

Mining and related activities caused plant productivity and soil carbon content reduced in arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Soil carbon plays an essential role in ecosystem stability. Soil carbon and associated changes in soil property were important drivers and indicators of ecosystem recovery at post-mining areas. We selected 5, 10 and 20 years of restoration lands to examine the effect of artificial grassland on vegetation community and soil property. Results showed that artificial grassland markedly increased the biomass, canopy coverage and soil carbon content, but decreased soil bulk density and soil water content. After 10-year of restoration, both the biomass and soil organic carbon (SOC) content reached the peak, however, soil bulk density and soil water content arrived the lowest at depth of 0-20 cm and got the highest at depth of 20-30 cm. At 20-year of restoration land, the biomass (above-and belowground) and SOC content (0-30 cm) significantly decreased by 46.2 % and 67.0 % with compared to 10-year of restoration land, while soil bulk density of 0-10 cm and 10-20 cm depths increased by 7.8 % and 21.4 %, respectively, soil water content (0-30 cm) increased by 11.6 % . It was evident that artificial grassland as an effective ecological restoration approach could improve soil physicchemical property, while properly anthropogenic perturbations were also needed to stimulate plant growth.

Soil ecophysiological and microbiological indices of soil health: a study of coal mining site in sonbhadra, uttar Pradesh

“…The pH of soils varied from alkaline to acidic. The alkaline pH indicates optimal range for plant growth but a lower pH cause problem for normal growth of the plants and it has been proved that soil pH was improved by the revegetation process (Jha and Singh, 2011;Yang et al, 2015 ). It was reported previously that due to deposition of excessive mineral during mining, soil turn out to be acidic (Jha and Singh, 2011;Harun et al, 2014).…”

“…In the dump soils urease activity was found to be less due to the absence of plant cover in dump sites. Speier et al, (1980) (Yang et al, 2015). Therefore, it is important to select effective PGPR isolates with stress tolerant potential which will enhance plant growth modifies soil characteristics.…”

Revegetation pattern affecting accumulation of organic carbon and total nitrogen in reclaimed mine soils

“…The effects of mining (Shrestha & Lal, 2011) and reclamation followed by the establishment of forests (Ussiri, Lal & Jacinthe, 2006;Mukhopadhyay & Masto, 2016;Ahirwal, Maiti & Reddy, 2017;Ahirwal, Maiti & Singh, 2017;Ahirwal & Maiti, 2018), grasslands (Evanylo et al, 2005;Yang et al, 2015), and croplands (Yuan et al, 2017) on the SOC and TN pools have been assessed in many studies. However, the soils planted under various revegetation patterns have different SOC and TN stocks and sequestration capacities due to their different erosion rates, deposition rates, and the input quantities of above-and belowground litter (Wei et al, 2009;Maraseni & Pandey, 2014).…”

Effects of biotic and abiotic factors on soil organic carbon in semi-arid grassland

“…So it is necessary to determine more effective strategies for land use and vegetation management to ameliorate the rising level of atmospheric CO2 (Yang et al, 2015).…”