Responses of soil microbial community activities and soil physicochemical properties to coal fly ash soil amendment

Background Hundreds of millions of tons coal fly ash are produced annually to support economic development and industrial production.

However, directly applying coal fly ash to agricultural production can decrease the land productivity and pose a threat to the ecosystem due to the poor physicochemical properties and seriously heavy metal pollution.

Methods In this study, a field experiment to investigate the effects of coal fly ash as a soil amendment was conducted in Hebei province, China.

The coal fly ash (CFA) soil field was mixed with the carrier soil (CS, without containing coal fly ash) at different rates (0–40% mass content) in the 0–20 cm layer of top soil and then mixed with a rotovator.

The soil was then amended with 0.45–1.80 kg·m^− 2 of G1 soil amendment for planting corn.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the response mechanism of soil microbial community activities, and soil physicochemical properties to soil amendment and carrier soil in coal fly ash soil.

Key results The study found that the G1 amendment, which consisted of humic acid, polyacrylamide, zeolite powder, and FeSO_4·7H_2O, improved the soil chemical properties and physical structure by increasing soil bulk density and macroaggregates.

The highest corn yield was observed in B5 (20% CS and 1.3500 kg·m^− 2 G1).

Meanwhile, the abundance of microorganisms that facilitate the circulation of soil nutrients such as Acidobacteria (77.05%), Sphingomonas (25.60%), Nitrospira (20.78%), Streptomyces (11.32%), and Gaiella (10.20%) was increased.

Conclusions Overall, our results indicate that the use of coal fly ash soil as a amendment can enhance soil sustainability by improving soil microbial functions.

These findings provide a reference for the development and application of coal fly ash soil amendments.