Mining activities, particularly for resources like iron ore [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], significantly alter landscapes and disrupt critical ecosystem functions, most notably impacting soil properties and microbial communities [6, 7, 35, 44, 45]. Ecological restoration is crucial for the recovery of these degraded lands [6, 44, 45], and the re-establishment of healthy soil microbial communities, including fungi, is fundamental to this process [8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 20, 21, 34, 35, 44]. Fungi play diverse and vital roles in soil, including nutrient cycling (e.g., decomposition [43]), plant symbiosis (mycorrhizae [11, 15, 20, 25, 48, 55, 56]), and soil structure formation [8, 12]. Analyzing fungal communities based on their ecological guilds, groups of species performing similar functions [17, 18, 19], provides a powerful lens to assess functional recovery during restoration [19, 40, 41, 45, 46]. Ecological redundancy, where multiple species within a guild perform similar roles, is hypothesized to contribute to ecosystem stability and resilience [39, 57]. This study investigated the composition of fungal functional guilds and explored evidence for ecological redundancy in a revegetated post-mining environment compared to an adjacent unmined area [9]. Soil samples were collected from both sites, fungal communities were characterized using metabarcoding (ITS region) [28, 29, 37, 38], and fungal guilds were assigned using bioinformatic tools [18]. Statistical analysis compared community diversity, composition [31, 37, 39], and guild structure [19, 40, 41, 45, 46], alongside co-occurrence network analysis [49, 50, 51, 52, 56]. Results revealed distinct fungal communities between the sites but suggested a degree of functional convergence or redundancy within key guilds in the restored area. These findings highlight the complex recovery trajectories of soil fungal communities and underscore the importance of considering functional roles in evaluating restoration success in post-mining landscapes.

Fungal Guilds, Ecological Redundancy, Post-Mining Environment

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