Table 1.
Abbreviations for 15 mill mud, bagasse, and soil samples.
Different text styles are used to highlight the degree of sample aging: mill mud and bagasse without aging (collected indoor within the operating sugarcane factory, plain text), samples aged by varying degrees of environmental exposure (italicized), and soil without mill mud or bagasse for comparison (underlined).
Fig 1.
Chemical analysis of bagasse, soil, and mud collected from sugarcane production facilities.
(a) Principal components analysis and (b) heatmap with complete linkage clustering. Results were normalized to within row variance with the colored scale bar representing standard deviations from within-row means [23].
Table 2.
Average values of chemistry clades by sample type (†based on heatmap clustering in Fig 1, mud-LA3-S and mud-LA3-O were included as soils due to their chemical similarity to other soils).
Within-column values with the different super script letters were significantly different from one another as determined by Tukey’s HSD: pH of bagasse vs. soil = 2.7553 (p = 0.0009); mud vs. soil = 1.722 (p = 0.0057). P2O5 of bagasse vs. mud 2.0476 (p = 0); mud vs. soil = 1.8543 (p = 0); C:N of bagasse vs. mud = 74.469 (p = 0); bagasse vs. soil = 60.3313 (p = 0.0003).
Fig 2.
Average relative abundance of 16S rRNA genes from the 5 most abundant phyla.
Fig 3.
Alpha diversity analyses of samples based on observed 16S rRNA gene (97% similarity).
Table 3.
Significance of alpha diversity ANOVA and Tukey’s post-hoc test.
Fig 4.
Correlations between C:N ratios and alpha diversity metrics.
For ease of comparison, Faith’s index values were divided by 100.
Fig 5.
Beta diversity analyses of samples based on the relative abundances of the top 10 phyla.
(a) Principal component and (b) heatmap with complete linkage clustering.