Bacterial and Fungal Community Shifts and Environmental Drivers in Talahao Coal Mine Water

Underground coal extraction alters aquatic ecosystems. Quantitative evaluation of microbial responses serves as an indicator for ecological security. High-throughput amplicon sequencing and structural equation modeling were applied to analyze aquatic bacterial and fungal communities before and after operations at the Talahao coal mine. Mining activities correlated with altered physicochemical water properties and reduced microbial community evenness. Environmental variables, including ion accumulation and suspended solid concentrations, mediated the indirect effects of mining on microbial restructuring based on structural equation models. Taxonomic composition shifted across domains following extraction. Pre-mining bacterial communities contained higher proportions of the genera Devosia and Acidovorax. Post-mining bacterial communities experienced an enrichment of the genus Malikia and the family Methylomonadaceae. Pre-mining fungal communities included Cladosporium and Aspergillus. Post-mining fungal communities exhibited a subterranean response pattern dominated by unclassified lineages and taxa belonging to Basidiobolaceae diverging from surface soil reference frameworks. Functional predictions indicated divergent stability between the two domains. Bacterial inferred functional profiles remained stable despite taxonomic restructuring. Fungal assemblages underwent compositional shifts in trophic guilds. These data provide a baseline regarding the divergent functional stability between bacterial and fungal communities in water bodies before and after underground coal extraction and establish biological indicators for environmental assessment.