The spatial design of the ecological remediation of a tailing dam to enhance the dispersal of Apodemus sylvaticus and Carabus violaceus

The mining and processing of metalliferous minerals are significant causes of ecological deterioration in many catchments, particularly in their mountainous areas, as well as downstream due to the dispersion of pollutants along rivers. Controlling and reversing the deterioration processes due to the mining and processing industry can be done: 1. at the industrial sources (mines, mining dumps, tailing dumps, smelters, and other industrial sources) 2. by transversal buffers to retain the fluxes of pollutants before they enter the streams 3. by longitudinal buffers along the streams, either natural (floodplains) or in the form of treatment wetlands (usually immediately downstream of other forms of control at the source of pollution). The approach to deterioration control is usually sectoral, with mining companies and the industry ministry at the source, soil managers or forest managers responsible for transversal buffer zones on the slope areas of the catchments, and water managers responsible for streams and their floodplains. There is currently no integration of all types of control measures; however, once the concept of ecosystem services has been partially incorporated into sectoral policies, there is potential for such integration. The concept of ecosystem services was more rapidly integrated into soil, forest, and water policies, ultimately reaching the field of industrial ecology, specifically the subfield of managing socio-ecological systems with industrial mining sites. The mining closure phase was, and still is in most cases, approached in isolation from any landscape context and from the contribution of restored or remediated sites to the production of ecosystem services by the surrounding landscapes. A growing body of literature now exists on the mining and processing industry, on the one hand, and species diversity and ecosystem services, on the other. Most of this literature focuses on the deteriorating effects of mines and industry on the production of ecosystem services. However, there are also a few ideas about how to design remediation and restoration in mining and processing industry areas to contribute to the overall production of ecosystem services in landscapes. There is a rather complicated taxonomy of greening methods of tailing dams and mining dumps, but for this text, we operationally separate only between restoration (which makes sense when the former natural ecosystem is still existing in some degraded state) and remediation (which can also be applied to new ecosystems such as piles of rocks and tailing materials). Remediation can be designed based on simple agricultural principles, using a single grass or tree species (“engineering approach”), or more complex ecological principles, aiming to accelerate ecological succession during the remediation process (“ecological approach”). The degradation of the environment due to the influence of anthropogenic factors showed remarkable growth during the period of industrial intensification, from 1965 to 1990. One of the major consequences of this revolution was the creation of historically polluted areas or sites, resulting in an alarming situation and practice that continues to this day. With the facts already demonstrated over the years, the deterioration achieved through the overexploitation of natural resources or the fragmentation of habitats has become an unsustainable practice, for example, for the generation of ecosystem services. In the current Romanian context, decision-making is closely tied to the measures, decisions, and needs established and agreed upon by the European Union, thereby placing considerable pressure on the country's legislative powers. It is also worth mentioning that the United Nations Organization has placed emphasis on the sustainable and durable development of various areas of the social, economic, and ecological sectors. Due to the above, action must be taken, with a primary focus on measures to test and substantiate scientific methods of rehabilitation and ecological reconstruction at the national level. This need is legislatively supported by the National Strategy and the National Plan for the Management of Contaminated Situations in Romania (HG 683/2015). The idea of the research project () which hosted the research reported in this license thesis is a combination of the two, namely to devise the remediation at two scales, a small patch phytoremediation scale (with plants in combination with symbiotic fungi) and a spatial design of several types of patches (microhabitats) to enhance the dispersal of mobile species from the surrounding ecosystems. The activities of the thesis belong to the second objective of the project, which is how to spatially design vegetation microhabitats on the surface of the closed tailing dam. It is assumed that an enhanced dispersal of specie on the phyto-stabilized tailing (covered with vegetation that keeps most of the toxic elements in their root system and minimally transfer them aboveground) would lead more rapidly to high species richness in the remediated ecosystems, which in turn would be positively correlated with a higher role of the remediated tailing dam in the production of ecosystem services at the local landscape scale. This assumption (although itself a matter of research in ecology) is reasonable and generally accepted when evaluating the ecosystem service of maintaining species diversity. In Romania, in the Apuseni Mountains, numerous functioning and abandoned mining sites and processing facilities are located near Natura 2000 sites and national parks. The largest open-pit copper mine is owned by the Cuprumin S.A. state company and is located near the Arieș River, at the Trascău mountain N2000 site, and is expected to close in approximately 20 years. We took the largest tailing dam of Cuprumin S.A., Valea Seșii tailing dam, as a model system because the company was interested in the technology developed in the mentioned project. Remediation technologies develop from readiness level TRL0 (concept) to TRL12 (fully operational), and up to level 4 (demonstration) they are usually developed by public research organizations with public funds to catalyze their later uptake by industrial actors for further development from level 5 (transfer) to 12. The activities of this license contribute to the development between TRL4 and TRL5 levels. In this context, the goal of the license is to contribute to the development of a TRL4 eco-remediation technology for tailing dams, and the objectives are: · to screen the literature relevant to the dispersal of mobile organisms on remediated tailing dams · to simulate the dispersal of two selected species in different scenarios of spatial design of the vegetation microhabitats on the tailing dam. The conclusions are: For objective 1, to screen the literature relevant to the dispersal of mobile organisms on remediated tailing dams: · The most common approaches to modeling dispersal in landscape ecology are the least-cost models and individual-based dispersal models. · Space use theories tend to be developed specifically for various groups of organisms. Regarding calibrating and validating the models, in addition to scenario development, tight cooperation is needed between landscape ecologists/theoretical biologists and experts in the groups of organisms. · The relationship between ecological connectivity and the production of ecosystem services is well-established in the scientific literature. In areas with a mining and processing industry in their structure, research is mediated by methodological approaches (e.g., critical metal concentration, bioconcentration factor, lead isotopes, tree ring records), as well as case studies, often involving ecological systems with large-scale mining disasters. There is a new research direction addressing the spatial variation problem, including the effects of landscape connectivity. There is also an increasing presence of explicit approaches to ecosystem services in these areas, ranging from local to river basin scales. · Mapping with Citespace the literature about modeling the dispersal of beetles, frogs/amphibians, rodents/small mammals, and snakes/reptiles has shown that: o For beetles, there are three clusters, including the keyword ecosystem service. o For amphibians, there is a single cluster including the keyword ecosystem service. o For the other groups of organisms, modeling the dispersal was not yet intensively related to the problem of ecosystem service to generate clusters of literature. o For amphibians, there is a cluster including the keyword surface mine, dealing with the toxicity of ponds formed in closed surface mines on amphibians dispersed in such habitats. o For the other groups of organisms, there are no clusters with the keywords mining, surface mine, smelter, tailing, dump, or industry. o The problem of dispersal of organisms to remediated tailing dams in relation to the production of ecosystem services of the integrating landscape has not been approached by many scientists in the past, underlining the novelty of the second objective of this thesis. For objective 2, to simulate the dispersal of two selected species in different scenarios of spatial design of the vegetation microhabitats on the tailing dam: · Habitat remediation was performed using combined solutions, whereby habitat distributions are tested to favor direct spatial connectivity and functional connectivity. The proposed method of analysis, which favors the connectivity of both types, yields positive results. · Concerning the working hypothesis, whether the remediated pastures type habitats can benefit the species Carabus violaceus, the scenario that is considered the most optimal for this species is scenario number 8. Similarly, the installation of forest-type habitats in the stu