Erosión y desertificación.-Valorización de purines de cerdo en rehabilitación de espacios mineros: ensayos en condiciones de campo

Abstract

ABSTRACT The intense mining activity carried out in Cartagena-La Unión Mountain, in Murcia region, has provoked extremely high accumulation of heavy metals in the environment. Due to the absence of vegetation cover, these soils are very liable to erosion, either wind or water, and they represent the major source of heavy metals pollution for the local environment due to dust blow and leaching of the results of mineral weathering into nearby watercourses. After 4 years of experiments in plots (4 m2), it has been demonstrated the potential use of pig manure to rehabilitate degraded and polluted soils, increasing carbon content and nutrients, promoting aggregates stability, decreasing mobility of heavy metals and establishing plant cover. In this study we pretend to extrapolate the results obtained in these plot previous experiments to field large scale scenarios using pig manure to amend the polluted soil and phytostabilization technique with native species in order to allow spontaneous colonization by plants and minimise the risks associated to those mining areas.