ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Terrestrial Microbiology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1466452
This article is part of the Research TopicMicrobial Solutions for Restoring Depleted SoilsView all 6 articles
Impact of Root Exudates on Soil Reconstruction and Bacteria Community Resumption in Open-Pit Coal Mines
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Soil and Water Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, Haidian, China
- 2China Coal Technology & Engineering Group Shenyang Engineering Company, Shenyang, China
- 3Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China
- 4Division of Water Resources Engineering & Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden, Sweden
- 5Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Alabama A&M University, USA, United States
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Open-pit coal mine reconstructed ecosystems are ecologically fragile. Retained early stage topsoil is usually not enough to maintain plant growth. For this purpose, we used root exudates to fertilize the reconstructed soil and improve the functioning of the soil microorganism ecology. The roots exudates increased the concentration of organic matter and total nitrogen by 16-39%.Within a certain concentration range, the higher the concentration of root exudate, the higher the soil fertility. When the concentration of root exudate was 85%, the bacterial abundance decreased.The soil inorganic nitrogen N-NH4 + and N-NO3 -increased significantly by 11-21%. This significantly improved root growth and plant biomass for the reconstructed soil. The dominating bacteria community was driven by both root exudates components and plant root growth. Especially, the abundance of soil bacteria Actinobacteriota, Proteobacteria, and Chloroflexi were significantly promoted. Consequently, root exudates can be used to efficiently increase the soil fertility and improve the function and vegetation restoration in soil reconstruction of mines.
Keywords: root exudates, Open-pit coal mines, Soil reconstruction, Bacteria community, Diversity and abundance
Received: 18 Jul 2024; Accepted: 02 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Niu, Yang, Wu, Li, Zhang, Chen and Berndtsson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jianzhi Niu, School of Soil and Water Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, Haidian, China
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