Abstract: Tongling lies in the middle reach of Yangtze River in Anhui Province of China. It is an important city where copper mine is abundant. This paper surveyed the distribution of copper mine tailings in the Tongling City. There are five main domains that covered by Copper mine tailings.The difference of vegetation coverage and the water and soil conservation capacity vary from each tailings pool.with the elongation of the depositing time,the vegetation coverage and the water and soil conservation capacity improved. The main reason why plants can not colonize in the tailings is that the acrid media and the toxicity of the heavy metals,each tailings sample contained much copper,and low percentage of N,P,K and organic matters. The newly deposited tailings have no N and organic matter at all. There are 40 plant species belong to 37genera and 9 families that naturally and artificially colonized in the tailings,and 72.5% plants species found in the tailings belong to Gramineae,Compositae,Leguminosae.The perfect adaptive ecological mechanisms determine there to be the pioneer and dominant species colonized in the copper tailings.It will take the plants a long time to develop a stable system. The revegetation in the tailings is also a long time job.

Key words: copper mine tailings, characteristic of tailings, vegetation coverage, plant species