Kate Montgomery1, Lisa Chandler, Dr Thomas Mooney, Dr Andrew Harford
1Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, Darwin, Australia
Ranger Uranium Mine in Kakadu National Park ceased mining in early 2021 and activity on the site has since focused on rehabilitation of the landform. To ensure that the ecosystem function is on a trajectory toward a natural state, current research is focusing on the health and function of soil microbial communities and their ability to effectively contribute to nutrient cycling on the rehabilitated landform. Specifically, this project will develop cost-effective, omics-based methods for the rapid assessment of soil ecosystem function. To achieve this, it will characterise soil microbial assemblages and quantify the abundance of genes present, establishing a link between microbial structure and function. Genomic and chemical data will be collected from reference and disturbed sites, encompassing a range of vegetation structures, to build a model that predicts the development and sustainability of nutrient cycling. The model will be used to assess the trajectory of nutrient cycling development on the rehabilitated landform and to test the success of treatments and mitigations. Illumina amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA and fungal ITS genes has been undertaken to provide a preliminary identification of soil microbes. Future extension of this work aims to use Shotgun Metagenome sequencing to provide more accurate species identification and functional information for the species present. This presentation will discuss the results from the first year of this project, which have focused on the initial characterisation of native soil microbiota found in reference ecosystems and compared this to the soil fauna on the newly vegetated landform.
Biography:
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