Abstract
Ecological restoration of coal mine dumps has become a key factor in maintaining ecosystem health. Despite widespread recognition of its importance, relatively few studies have evaluated the effects of restoration. Accordingly, in this study, we investigated the characteristics of microbial communities from a coal mine dump using Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing. We evaluated the differences in microbial communities among six different sites with regard to abundance, structural diversity, and multifunctionality. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) effect size (LEfSe) showed that several species exhibited significant differences in between-habitat diversity as biomarkers. Three generalists, i.e., Nitrosomonadaceae, Rhizobiales, and Acidimicrobiales, were identified using molecular ecological networks analysis. Redundancy analysis and structural equation modeling showed that microbial communities were closely related to environmental factors. Overall, our findings established a reliable method for identifying bioindicators during the ecological restoration of coal mine dumps and suggested that appropriate manual maintenance improved restoration efforts.
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