Abstract
Phytoremediation is a group of technologies that use plants to reduce, remove, degrade, or immobilize environmental toxins, primarily those of anthropogenic origin, with the aim of restoring area sites to a condition useable for private or public applications. The poor physical structures, acidity, lack of nutrients, presence of toxic heavy metals are the common characteristics of mine tailings. Bare tailings are prone to erosion, resulting in further environmental degradation as the very young soils develop on unstable materials with low cohesion. Appropriate vegetative cover of such bare tailings can overcome the adverse physical and chemical properties of them. Collecting naturally growing plant species on such tailings and the evaluation of plant metal concentrations can be used to get information about specific plant behaviour in this environment. Thus considering the diversity of plant responses in contaminated sites having different metal and toxicity levels, at various levels, it is important to study the composition of plant community that was established on metal enriched tailings that would serve as a basic approach for phytoremediation. In this paper, general aspects of phytoremediation processes, plant response to soil heavy metals, the pathway of metal in plants, different extraction methods used for prediction of plant availability of metals in soil and outcome of various studies regarding trace metal contents and their accumulation in plant species growing on metal enriched spoils/tailings are reviewed.
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