Melissa Hillwig, Danielle Scheunemann, Stephanie Clark and Maria KalevitchMelissa Hillwig, Danielle Scheunemann, Stephanie Clark and Maria Kalevitch
Keywords: Pennsylvania, acid mine drainage (AMD), fabrication of soil, amending soil, bacterial communities, highthroughput sequencing
Abstract: Integrity of soil is extremely important from an ecological standpoint. When mining for natural resources occurs, the soil is disrupted and often times removed leaving behind soil of poor nutritional quality for both flora and fauna. Soil fabrication and/or planting are often employed for remediation purposes to amend the soil quality. The major goal of our study was to compare bacteria using 16s rDNA of soil collected from an acid mine drainage site to nearby soil plots where remediation or fabrication of the soil took place. The diversity of represented phyla from the fabricated sites was 2-3 times greater than the diversity found in the mining soil. The most abundant phyla from the mining soil site were Proteobacteria (66%) and from the amended soil either Proteobacteria (45%) or Firmicutes (45.5-57.5%). The distribution of species varied between samples. The most diverse sample was the compost sample (7.8x increase) compared to the mining soil; while the least diverse sample was the ray grass (4.2 fold increase). Our results indicate that specific methods for environmental improvement of the soil increased microorganism diversity beyond the number of species present in unamended mining soil alone.
[View Complete Article]