Method of Assessing Soil Quality and Health

摘要

The present invention relates to a method of assessing the soil quality and health of mined and un-mined lands. The present invention further relates to a method of assessing ecosystem health and soil restoration efforts. The method employs a multi-prong approach combining DNA fingerprinting and in-depth pyrosequencing of soil microorganisms that are responsible for maintaining soil fertility and productivity. The method incorporates assessing the indigenous bacterial community structure data derived from PCR-DGGE analysis and 165 rRNA gene clone libraries, and then further identification of those microorganisms that are known to promote soil health by soil metagenome analysis. Disparity between un-mined and post-mined soils are comprehensively studied via multivariate statistical analyses on the polyphasic dataset.