Research partnership explores using fungi and bacteria to restore prairie grassland and help plants thrive in southern Alberta
Most people are familiar with taking probiotics to promote gut health, but can they be used to restore the environment?
New research co-led by Athabasca University will explore the potential of “probiotics for plants” in the form of fungi and bacteria to help restore prairie grassland at a former coal mine in southern Alberta.
“These are probiotics for plants,” explained Dr. Srijak Bhatnagar, an assistant professor of microbial ecology and computational biology with AU’s Faculty of Science and Technology.
What we want to see is whether these microbes make the plants healthier and more tolerant to stress so they can survive and help restore the grasslands to native vegetation.
Microbes a small solution to century-old problem
The research is part of a four-year, $500,000 project involving AU, Lethbridge Polytechnic, and the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Alberta Innovates recently awarded nearly $250,000 for the first phase of the research, which is being co-led by Bhatnagar and Lethbridge Polytechnic’s Dr. Adriana Morrell.
The team will introduce commercially available fungi and bacteria to native grass seedlings before being transplanted in a Nature Conservancy property at the Leitch Collieries in the Crowsnest Pass.
The former coal mine, now a provincial historic site, hasn’t operated in more than a century, yet Bhatnagar said the local topsoil in some areas is “pretty much non-existent.” Typically, such sites are highly eroded and can be high in heavy metals such as selenium and mercury. This makes it challenging for prairie grasses to recover or survive.
“We know that plants don’t grow well without microbes around,” he said.
Especially in the case of plants, both bacteria and fungi bring a lot of beneficial functions, including making nutrients available from rocks and soil and helping with stress tolerance.
Transplanting plants at Leitch Collieries
Once researchers have a better understanding of soil conditions, they’ll begin restoration work by growing plants fortified with bacteria and fungi inside Lethbridge Polytechnic’s greenhouses. From there, the plants will be transplanted to an area near the collieries.
From his lab in Calgary, Bhatnagar will study microbial activity and the success of microbial colonization for the duration of the four-year project. The hope is the probiotic-packed plants will not only survive but thrive. If successful, the process could be a cost-effective solution for the restoration of other former industrial sites, he said.
“It could be any disturbed land on the Prairies—pipelines, oil and gas infrastructure, a solar or wind farm. All of those require restoration, which means going back and reintroducing indigenous plants.”
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