Microbes are Evaluation Tools for Mine Site Reclamation Efforts
The Challenge
Mining companies want to minimize the environmental impacts of their operations by restoring the environment following mine closure. However, evaluating the success of reclamation efforts can be time-consuming, expensive, and inefficient.
Traditional methods typically involve extensive fieldwork and are often qualitative and subjective. These efforts can be costly and fail to provide real-time feedback on the effectiveness of the reclamation strategies.
The Solution
From something as simple as a grab sample, DNA barcoding can be quickly and affordably used for quantitative tracking of complex communities that aren’t observable by the naked eye, revealing information about thousands of community members from a single sample. Capturing ecosystem diversity, these methods can be used to evaluate the presence of insects, plants, animals, and microbes. Simply put, as animals live and roam in an environment, they shed cells and DNA that can be used to identify and track their activity.
While insects, plants, and animals are the most common ways for measuring reclamation success, microbes are much more sensitive sensors of environmental change and can provide early indication of the success or failure of reclamation efforts. By monitoring the microbial communities in tandem with insects, plants, and animals at reclaimed mining sites and comparing them to undisturbed sites nearby, we can learn about the effectiveness of the reclamation strategies, even at early stages of efforts that span decades.
Using microbes as biosensors gives companies timely insights that allows them to adjust current efforts and inform future reclamation strategies. This tool is a streamlined, cost-effective approach that helps ensure that regulatory requirements are met.
Koonkie’s Approach
At Koonkie, we leverage the power of DNA. In addition to capturing the diversity of insects, plants and animals, we use microbial communities as sensitive and timely sensors of mine site reclamation efforts in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. For example, we sampled the microbial communities from multiple sites subject to different reclamation efforts. By comparing them to a nearby undisturbed environment, we were able to identify the reclamation strategy that most effectively restored the microbial community to match the state of the natural neighboring environment. The data provided evidence of successful remediation at specific sites, and informed reclamation strategies, streamlining and reducing the costs of future work.
This timely and sensitive method can improve the effectiveness of monitoring environmental impacts overall, and align with the needs of regulatory bodies.
About Koonkie
Koonkie's team of biologists, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists have the highly-specific expertise required to create a sampling plan, identify the microbes present in these communities, and track changes in their composition over time. Koonkie uses DNA sequencing to decode which and how many microbes are present in specific samples, and what they can do in the environment.
Want to learn more? Reach out to services@koonkie.com to schedule a consultation.
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