Mines to forests? Analyzing long‐term recovery trends for surface coal mines in Central Appalachia

Abstract

Mountaintop removal mining, and other surface mining operations have severe, large‐scale impacts on the communities and ecosystems of Appalachia. The impact of this disturbance surpasses that of other land clearing events, such as fire or timber harvesting; mines remove both established vegetation and soil, but also alter landscape topography. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act legally mandates restoration of former mines after the end of mining activity, yet the long‐term outcomes of restoration efforts across Central Appalachia are unknown. We conducted the first regionwide analysis of the lands mined between 1985 and 2015 in Central Appalachia, and explore post‐mining ecological trajectories. Pairing mine‐footprint and remote sensing data, we characterize the vegetation trends and site health at 71,140 mine sites across Central Appalachia. We use first order autoregressive models to describe the rates of recovery, expected long‐term ecological state, and probability of recovery to reference state for former mines. We found that only 7.9% of sites recover to 95% of the forest reference condition in all remote sensing indices. Overall only 0.10% of sites have a 95% probability of reaching or exceeding reference forests in all remote sensing indices. While much of these mined lands are intentionally not being reforested, 19% of mines in Kentucky, 81% of mines in Virginia, and 46.5% of mines in West Virginia have declared forestry as the primary land use for post‐mining operations. Our results indicate that post‐mining forests are not recovering to a level that is consistent with average forest conditions in similar unmined sites.