Technosol rehabilitation strategies drive soil physico-chemical properties and fauna diversity on a former coking plant area

Abstract

Anthropic activities such as mining, resource extraction or transformation profoundly modify ecosystems and may lead to Technosol formation. Post-industrial areas are examples of potentially degraded lands, due to soil contamination with metals or organic pollutants, as well as soil structure damage. Soil biodiversity being closely involved in many soil functions such as organic matter decomposition, formation and stabilization of soil structure, the recovery of degraded soil functions partly depends on soil fauna colonization. However, the relationship between Technosol abiotic parameters and soil fauna colonization is still to be disentangled. In an attempt to fill this gap, we studied a former coking plant area in north-eastern France, composed of Technosols resulting from coking plant embankments or thermally-treated industrial soils and compared them with two local soils considered as references. We hypothesized that the taxonomic and trophic diversity of Technosol-dwelling invertebrates would be more diverse and abundant in the soils with the higher soil physico-chemical quality (i.e higher fertility and lower pollutions levels). To test this hypothesis, we studied four Technosols that were settled following two different rehabilitation strategies within the same post-industrial area and we compared them with two local soils of reference using nested ANOVAs as well as multivariate analyses of soil abiotic parameters and soil fauna community indices, both within the soil and on its surface.The results on physico-chemical analyses showed that the substrates used for Technosol rehabilitation were impoverished in clay content when compared with local soils of reference (4.1 to 7.8-fold) and enriched in sandy materials. The use of coking plant by-products for Technosol implementation have led to poor chemical quality, with low nutrient content but high organic carbon content (41 to 51%) resulting from the use of coal and correlated with the higher lead concentration in the area. The use of thermally-treated industrial soil has led to more fertile Technosols with significantly lower lead content. Meso and macrofauna densities did not vary significantly between the Technosols and the local reference soils. Both Technosol-dwelling fauna trophic and taxonomic community compositions were impacted by the rehabilitation strategy. Few to no earthworms were found in Technosols (mean up to 16 ind.m−2) compared to the local soils of reference (mean of 118.4 and 201.6 ind.m−2). Conversely, Technosols resulting from coking plant embankments and thermally-treated industrial soils were dominated by epigeic soil fauna with an intense activity of soil surface macro-saprophages and micro-arthropods, as well as Formicidae. Our results suggest that the use of technogenic elements in the rehabilitation of post-industrial area led to the development of specific soil invertebrate communities, different from the reference. The gap between the high level of activity of epigeic organisms that we found on Technosols and the low trophic diversity of the litter and soil-dwelling communities suggest that the soil fauna community on a former coking plant is driven rather by soil physico-chemical properties than by colonization constraints.