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Restoration of rare earth mine areas: organic amendments and phytoremediation

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Abstract

Overexploitation of rare earth mine has caused serious desertification and various environmental issues, and ecological restoration of a mining area is an important concern in China. In this study, experiments involving dry grass landfilling, chicken manure broadcasting, and plant cultivation were carried out to reclaim a rare earth mine area located in Heping County, Guangdong Province, China. The prime focus was to improve soil quality in terms of nutrients, microbial community, enzyme activity, and physicochemical properties so as to reclaim the land. After 2 years of restoration, an increase of organic matter (OM), available potassium (K), available phosphorus (P) levels, and acid phosphatase (ACP) activity and a reduction of the available nitrogen (N) level and urease (URE) activity in soil were achieved compared to the original mined land. The nutrients and enzyme activities in soil with 5 years of restoration were close to or surpass those in the unexploited land as control. The bulk density, total porosity, water holding capacity, pH, and electrical conductivity (EC) of soil were improved, and the number of cultivable microorganisms and the bacterial diversity in soil were greatly increased with time during ecological restoration, especially for surface soil. Furthermore, the artificial vegetation stably grew at the restored mining sites. The results indicated that organic amendments and phytoremediation could ecologically restore the rare earth mining sites and the mined land could finally be planted as farmland.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Qing X. Li from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, for his comments on this manuscript. This work was supported by Guangdong Provincial S & T Department under the Production-Education-Research Cooperation Project between Guangdong Province and the National Education Ministry of China (Nos. 2010B090400465 and 2012B090900010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Life Sciences, Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering, Guangzhou, 510225, China

    Lingyan Zhou, Zhaolong Li, Wen Liu, Shenghong Liu, Limin Zhang, Liyan Zhong, Ximei Luo & Hong Liang

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  1. Lingyan Zhou
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  2. Zhaolong Li
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  4. Shenghong Liu
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Correspondence to Hong Liang.

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Responsible editor: Zhihong Xu

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Table 5 Sequences of the primers used in bacterial DNA diversity analysis
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Zhou, L., Li, Z., Liu, W. et al. Restoration of rare earth mine areas: organic amendments and phytoremediation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 22, 17151–17160 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-4875-y

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