Organic matter amendment in copper mine tailings improving primary physical structure, water storage and native grass growth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The lack of macropore structure and hydraulic functions in base metal mine tailings poses primary constraints to plant establishment. Organic matter is fundamentally important to soil aggregation, structural stability and water infiltration, but is lacking in the finely ground tailings. The present study initially investigated effects of organic matter amendment on water infiltration and storage, and leachate chemistry and the growth of native grass species. A semiȬfield trial using 1 m3 square containers was established at a site adjacent to a large tailings storage facility at Ernest Henry Copper Mine (EHM), Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia. The amendment treatments include intact tailings (consolidated from directly deposited wet-slurry of tailings into a container), tailings (loose air-dry tailings without any amendment), 10% hay (loose tailings mixed with 10% v/v dry hay) and 20% hay (loose tailings mixed with 20% v/v dry hay). Two replicates of each treatment were surfaced with about 10 cm layer of black soil (vertisol), into which seed mix of six native grass species were directly sown in January 2011. In a separate set of containers (duplicates in each treatment), a pair of ceramic suction cups (20 cm and 80 cm below the surface) were horizontally inserted into the central position of a container for collecting leachates to monitor salt fluxes in the profiles. The observation that a lower volume of leachate solution was collected from the non-amended tailings suggests that the infiltration and storage of rainwater in the profile was limited without hay amendment. The initial results have demonstrated that the hay amendment was essential to successful grass growth and development to flowering and seed-setting, with > 80% surface coverage in the 20% hay containers at the flowering stage, in contrast to the low survival and poor growth of the grasses in the intact tailings and the loose tailings treatment. Meanwhile the hay amendment increased sulphate (up to 334 g SO42+/L), chloride (up to 7 g/L) and salinity (up to 51 mS/cm) in the pore water of the amended tailings. These results confirmed the argument that the physical and hydraulic constraints were the primary ones to the establishment of native grass community, rather than the chemistry of pore water in the tailings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".