Abstract
Silicon fertilizer and biochar have been widely used to remediate soil contaminated by heavy metals. The effects and mechanism of silicon fertilizer and biochar addition on the heavy metal availability, soil biological properties, and microbial community characteristics need further study in soils contaminated by heavy metals. Therefore, this research determined how silicon fertilizer, biochar, and their combined using affected microbial communities related with nitrogen and phosphorus cycling. The abundance and composition of the microbial community were evaluated by quantitative PCR and phospholipid fatty acid analysis, respectively. Results showed that silicon fertilizer and biochar addition significantly changed soil properties, including pH, total organic carbon, ammonium, nitrate. The Cd and Zn speciation were significantly reduced by silicon fertilizer, biochar, and their integrated application. Microbial community abundance and structure were also significantly changed. Principal component analysis shows that the difference in soil microbial community structure is the most obvious under the combined addition of biochar, silicon fertilizer and biochar. In addition, the results of fluorescence quantitative PCR showed that with biological addition, the number of soil bacteria was significantly reduced. This study reveals the influence of silicon fertilizer and biochar on bacterial and fungal communities in heavy metal soils and the effect of soil heavy metal availability.
Highlights
Heavy metal pollution is a common environmental problem, which has a serious negative impact on surrounding ecological environments and human health [1, 2]
Because the carbonate and silicate in the biochar can combine with H+, this will reduce the H+ in the soil and water, thereby increasing the pH of the soil
The increase in soil pH caused by the addition of silicon fertilizer may be due to the presence of a large amount of silicate
Summary
Heavy metal pollution is a common environmental problem, which has a serious negative impact on surrounding ecological environments and human health [1, 2]. Human production activities (such as agricultural fertilizer application, chemical industry manufacturing, mineral mining) are the main factor for the accumulation of heavy metals in the soil [3]. About 10% of farmland in China was contaminated by different kinds and levels of heavy metals [4]. Effective measures must be taken to repair the soil contaminated by heavy metals and restore its functions. In order to solve the problem of heavy metal pollution, a large number of remediation strategies have been widely used [5, 6]. Silicon fertilizer has been widely shown to be effective in the remediation of heavy metal contamination, and increase agricultural production and crop yields [9,10,11]. Wang et al found that silicon fertilizer significantly increased the yield of Chinese cabbage
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