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Soil provides an array of ecological services, including crop yield, biodiversity conservation, and water quality regulation. Various soil functions are required for sustaining these ecological services. With the advancement of human civilization and rapid industrialization, a considerable number of heavy metals are released into the soil environment, posing serious health risks to soil biodiversity and simultaneously polluting the food chain via bio-magnification. Therefore, several indices have been developed by researchers for assessing the heavy metal stress on soil microbes. Versatility index, toxicity index and Shannon-Wienen index are few of the many which give us an understanding of the impact of heavy metal contamination on soil microbes.

Keywords: Heavy metal, Versatility index, Shannon-Wienen index, Toxicity index

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3. A brief account of different microbial indices under heavy metal toxicity_compressed.pdf