Integrating environmental variables by multivariate ordination enables the reliable estimation of mineland rehabilitation status

JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

卷:256

Article

Gastauer, Markus¹  Caldeira, Cecilio Frois¹  Ramos, Silvio Junio¹  Trevelin, Leonardo Carreira¹  Jaffe, Rodolfo¹  Oliveira, Guilherme¹  Ortiz Vera, Mabel Patricia^1,2  Pires, Eder¹  de Aguiar Santiago, Flavia Louzeiro³  Carbone Carneiro, Marco Aurelio³  Asoa Coelho, Felipe Tadashi⁴  Silva, Rosilene⁴  Souza-Filho, Pedro Walfir M.¹  Siqueira, Jose-Oswaldo¹ 

[1] Inst Tecnol Vale, Rua Boaventura Silva 955, Belem, Para, Brazil

[2] Univ Fed Para, Programa Posgrad Genet & Biol Mol, Rua Augusto Correa 01, Belem, Para, Brazil

[3] Univ Fed Lavras, Dept Ciencias Solo, Lavras, MG, Brazil

[4] Vale Diretoria Ferrosos Ctr Oeste, Rua Cabral 1555, Corumba, MS, Brazil

关键词: Environmental monitoring;    Ecological processes;    Functional diversity;    Environmental indicators;    Primers for environmental rehabilitation;    Urucum massif;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.jenvman.2019.109894

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Despite the wide variety of variables commonly employed to measure the success of rehabilitation, the assessment and subsequent definition of indicators of environmental rehabilitation status are not simple tasks. The main challenges are comparing rehabilitated sites with target ecosystems as well as integrating individual environmental and eventually collinear variables into a single tractable measure for the state of a system before effective indicators that track rehabilitation may be modeled. Furthermore, a consensus is lacking regarding which and how many variables need to be surveyed for a reliable estimation of rehabilitation status. Here, we propose a multivariate ordination to integrate variables related to ecological processes, vegetation structure, and community diversity into a single estimation of rehabilitation status. As a case, we employed a curated set of 32 environmental variables retrieved from nonrevegetated, rehabilitating and reference sites associated with iron ore mines from the Urucum Massif, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. By integrating this set of environmental variables into a single estimation of rehabilitation status, the proposed multivariate approach is straightforward and able to adequately address collinearity among variables. The proposed methodology allows for the identification of biases towards single variables, surveys or analyses, which is necessary to rank environmental variables regarding their importance to the assessment. Furthermore, we show that bootstrapping permitted the detection of the minimum number of environmental variables necessary to achieve reliable estimations of the rehabilitation status. Finally, we show that the proposed variable integration enables the definition of case-specific environmental indicators for more rapid assessments of mineland rehabilitation. Thus, the proposed multivariate ordination represents a powerful tool to facilitate the diagnosis of rehabilitating sites worldwide provided that sufficient environmental variables related to ecological processes, diversity and vegetation structure are gathered from nonrehabilitated, rehabilitating and reference study sites. By identifying deviations from predicted rehabilitation trajectories and providing assessments for environmental agencies, this proposed multivariate ordination increases the effectiveness of (mineland) rehabilitation.

【 授权许可】

Free