English

Abstract

The goal of returning diverse life to lands surface-mined for coal has followed the passage of the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA) into State mining reclamation acts and regulations promulgated therefrom. Expectations for the level of plant species diversity that should exist on lands revegetated under SMCRA has taken the form of a variety of performance standards that reflect the prevailing attitude that species diversity is an attribute that can be “made to happen.” Over 25 years of monitoring data from revegetated lands suggest that species diversity is not “made to happen” but rather “allowed to happen.” For sites with at least moderately favorable soils and climate, a recurring conclusion based on long-term monitoring data is that grasses (typically abundantly represented in revegetation seed mixes) are highly competitive in post-mining conditions. SMCRA and similar state requirements for unbroken post-mining surface configuration covered by substantial depths of agriculturally suitable soil have provided the ideal environment for the widespreading and dense root systems that grasses possess. As a result, the occurrence of non-grass plant species has typically been limited. It is posited that the longterm status of plant species diversity will be related to occasional interruptions of the overwhelming ecological dominance that grasses most often presently hold. As a consequence, the accretion of plant species richness at any particular location will be slow and to some degree unpredictable. Given, thus, that species diversity after 10 years or even 20 years may still be competitively suppressed, quantitative approaches are set forth for “looking into the future” to evaluate the availability of the less-competitive plant species to respond to eventual opportunities that would allow them to proliferate in the revegetated plant communities. Central to these approaches is the need to avoid direct matching of species’ abundance between reclaimed and reference areas. Instead, alternatives in the form of species presence, life-form similarity, and scale-corrected species density evaluations are described. Ecological reasoning underlying the approaches is examined. ___________________ 1 Paper was presented at the 2006 Billings Land Reclamation Symposium, June 4-8, 2006, Billings MT and jointly published by BLRS and ASMR, R.I. Barnhisel (ed.) 3134 Montavesta Rd., Lexington, KY 40502. 2 David L. Buckner, Ph.D. Senior Plant Ecologist, ESCO Associates Inc., P.O. Box 18775, Boulder, CO 80308 (303 499 4277) e-mail: escassoc@mindspring.com Proceedings America Society of Mining and Reclamation, 2006 pp 143DOI: 10.21000/JASMR06010143