Assessment of Ecosystem Health of Baogang Tailings Groundwater Based on Microbiome Index of Biotic Integrity (M-IBI)

Abstract

Index of Biological Integrity (IBI) is a scientific tool used to evaluate health of aquatic ecosystems. IBI associates anthropogenic influences with biological activity in the water body, and is formulated using data developed from biosurveys. Compared with other biotic assemblage indicators of water quality, little attention has been paid to the application of microbial community in ecosystem health assessment for groundwater bodies so far. An approach based on microbiome index of biotic integrity was developed to assess groundwater ecosystem health in this study. The method based on Illumina high-throughput DNA sequencing was applied to achieve the information of microbial community. The key environmental factors were selected based on CCA analysis and the optimized values were calculated for defining the taxonomic genera sensitive and resistant to these factors. The resulting candidate biotic factors were used to construct microbiome index of biotic integrity (M-IBI) evaluating system. The results showed among the studied sample sites from groundwater of Baogang rare earth tailings, 33.3% of samples were at "Great" level, 16.7% at "Good" level, most of samples (41.7%) at "moderate" level and 8.3% at "Bad" level. The ecosystem healthy status of the sample sites near the tailings was affected by human disturbances, while the samples far away the tailings were at healthy level. The results of the groundwater ecosystem healthy assessment based on M-IBI system had a good match with the groundwater quality standard based on chemical properties. It indicated that M-IBI could be a potential index to evaluate the health of groundwater ecosystem.