Fig. 5
The direct and indirect effects of temperature and the original mineral composition on zinc leaching efficiency. The effects of temperature, mineral composition and physicochemical parameters (model 1)/microbial community structure (model 2)/microbial diversity (model 3) on zinc leaching efficiency, explored with Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS-PM). Mineral composition and microbial community structure were represented by the top two axes (DCA1 and DCA2) of DCA. The whole physicochemical parameters was represent by the values of PC1 and PC2 (the top two axes) of PCA. The blue line represented the positive correlation, and the red line represented the negative correlation. The bold line showed the relation was significant (p < 0.05) or marginally significant (p < 0.1) and the regular line showed the relation was no significant. Models were assessed using goodness of fit (GoF) statistic. The GoFs for model 1–3 were 0.642, 0.599 and 0.642, respectively