The characteristics of soil seed bank and its application in ecological restoration of abandoned mining areas in China

A soil seed bank (SSB) is a set of viable seeds present in the soil and its surface litter, which is a major research content in the stressed environment for vegetation restoration and the adaptation mechanism.SSB serves as a potential seed source for regeneration of vegetation community and is crucial factor affecting the vegetation restoration of degraded ecosystems, especially for the mine ecosystems.Due to the special environmental characteristics of abandoned mining areas, the SSB studies of abandoned mining areas should make use of results of SSB in the other fragile habitats.Thus, this paper introduced not only characteristics of SSB in abandoned mining areas, but also the role of SSB in ecology system restoration, based on the literatures analysis.Besides, some new technologies in environment reclamation were also presented.Some suggestions concerning the future application of the SSB in restoring of abandoned mining areas were proposed based on the ecosystem characteristics of abandoned mining areas in China.The reclamation process of abandoned mining areas based on SSB should be applied according to the biotype backgrounds of the target areas, then the appropriate soil seed banks and its strengthening technologies should be determined, finally some fitting parameters should be selected to evaluate the ecological restoration of abandoned mining areas.