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1/28/08  Support Needed for Reforestation of Strip Mines           

            The Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI) is bringing hope that former strip mines in Appalachia can be restored to healthy forest.  An estimated 300,000 hectares of land in the Eastern United States on which mature forests gave way to surface mines are now essentially waste grassland, as a result of poor reclamation techniques.  These lands—and newly mined land—can be successfully planted with trees using the method advocated by ARRI and known as the Forest Reclamation Approach (FRA). 

After the passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) in 1977 coal companies were compelled to return land to its “approximate original contour” or to something that could pass as such.  They therefore became accustomed to tightly compacting the sandstone and shale that they had disturbed and planting on the compacted ground whatever they could easily apply that promised to prevent erosion, usually fast-growing grasses.  Any trees that took hold were likely to be scrubby because of the adverse growing conditions. 

 FRA, which fulfills the requirements of SMCRA, starts with land that has been stabilized but on this land workers create a non-compacted growth medium by depositing at least four feet of “topsoil, weathered sandstone, and/or the best available material” and loosely grading it.  They then plant native, non-competitive ground covers that are compatible with growing trees, such as slow-growing grasses, white clover, and birdsfoot trefoil, and the trees themselves.  These are native species and include both early-successional species to increase soil stability and hardwoods found in the area’s mature forests. 

Decades of scientific research, much of it at universities in the Appalachian states, went into the development of FRA.  However, ARRI was not founded until 2004, with the establishment of a core team, including staff of the federal Office of Surface Mining and state officials, who drew up a Statement of Mutual Intent.   A science team with members from area universities and the U.S. Forest Service was established in 2005.  Ongoing research includes efforts to adapt FRA to planting on steep land.  Since 2005 ARRI has inspired the planting of about ten million trees on more than 15,000 acres of land each year. 

Nevertheless, coal companies are slow to adopt FRA.  In Kentucky, where hundreds of thousands of acres have been strip-mined since 1980, the only places to see FRA in practice are test plots.  At the University of Kentucky’s Starfire research site in Perry County tulip poplars and ash planted ten years ago are now respectively up to twenty feet and thirty feet in height, and the canopy is closing. At a three-year-old university research project at Bent Mountain , a mountaintop removal site in Pike County, a thousand small disease-resistant chestnut trees are growing on one rocky acre.  The chestnut seedlings have a 75 percent to 90 percent survival rate.

The American Chestnut Foundation is among the organizations cooperating with ARRI, because it has discovered that former mine sites treated according to the FRA methodology are excellent locations for restoration of the American chestnut, virtually wiped out as a mature tree in the early twentieth century by a fungus from Asia.  By crossing the American chestnut with a blight-resistant Chinese chestnut, the foundation has produced chestnuts that are largely American in genetic makeup but blight resistant.  However, these trees are not resistant to another enemy of the chestnut, a pathogen in soil that causes root rot.  This pathogen is not found in the rocky spoil of strip mines.  

Pressure from the public is needed to get the FRA program implemented on a large scale.  You can learn more about ARRI and FRA at http://arri.osmre.gov .   ARRI seeks signatures by individuals and organizations of its Statement of Mutual Intent, available on the Web site.  If you live in Appalachia, you can learn how to get involved with ARRI in additional ways by contacting a representative from your state listed on the site.   

Sources:

Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative. Statement of Mutual Intent.  Revised February 2007.

Angel, Patrick, Office of Surface Mining. Presentation to the Bluegrass Group of the Sierra Club, Lexington, KY, January 21, 2007 and Personal Communication.

Burger, Jim et al.. “The Forestry Reclamation Approach.” Forest Reclamation Advisory, no. 2, December 2005.

Reese, Erik. “A Beautiful Mine.” New York Times, May 5, 2007.

Zipper, C.E. “Carbon Accumulation Potentials of Post-SMCRA Coal-Mined Lands,” in Meeting Proceedindgs: 30 Years of SMCRA and Beyond (Gillette, Wyoming, June 2-7, 2007) (Lexington, KY: American Society of Mining and Reclamation, 2007).

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