Response differences between soil fungal and bacterial communities under opencast coal mining disturbance conditions

Abstract

Despite significant progress in understanding the effect of disturbances on microbial communities, little research has been performed to systematically assess the stability of bacterial and fungal communities in response to environmental changes associated with opencast coal mining. To address this research gap, in this study, we investigated the characteristics of soil microbial communities along the distance gradient in the Shengli east#2 opencast coal mine using Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing. Through phylogenetic analysis and community heat map approaches, we observed that the structure of bacterial and fungal communities was altered by an opencast coal mining disturbance and that microorganisms associated with coal degradation and pollutant detoxification were enriched. LEfSe analysis and molecular ecological networks revealed that the fungal community was more stable than the bacterial community, as it exhibited more biomarkers and a more connected and complex ecological network despite having a lower species diversity. Redundancy analysis showed that soil enzymes among total environmental factors were consistently and tightly aggregated, suggesting that soil enzymes may be key drivers associated with microbial community stability. In summary, our findings provide innovative information for the ecological restoration of mining areas in the future.