Reforesting Appalachia's coal lands.

NEW FINDINGS ARE SHOWING THAT MINELAND RECLAMATION TAILORED FOR COMMERCIAL FORESTS IS BEST FOR THE LAND, THE OWNERS, AND SOCIETY IN GENERAL.

A VISITOR TO CENTRAL Appalachia might wonder what its remote, hilly, heavily strip-minded terrain is good for--aside from scenery and the coal beneath it. If you can't land a plane on it, a saying goes, it likely isn't good for growing crops or rasing cattle, though that hasn't kept people from trying.

But according to foresters at Virginia Tech and some of the region's landowners, these properties would work best as commercial forestland. In fact, they say, proper mineland reclamation provides a once-in-a-lifetime chance to replace poor forests and soils with good ones. And it's cheaper than what's being done today to reclaim most strip-mined lands.

Commercial forestland looks far more practical in central Appalachia than on other surface-mined spots in the U.S.--partly because its steep terrain can't be used for much else. In Wyoming's Powder River Basin, for example, the arid climate won't support dense forest. Reforestation makes sense on Minnesota's Iron Range, for it was logging that settled northern Minnesota; however, the trees mining companies planted there in the 1930s are not yet merchantable.

Large corporations have for many years owned most of the Appalachian coal fields. Long before Appalachia had a coal industry, early settlers depended on its timber. And once the coal reserves are depleted, the land over time will return to forest.

Between 1930 and 1980, a total of 1,454 square miles were strip-mined for bituminous coal in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee.

Currently, in those four states' primary coal counties, some 5,000 to 6,000 acres are surface-mined each year. Since 1977, passed the landmark Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), coal-mining companies have been required to refill the cuts they make and return the earth's surface to approximately its original contours.

Reclamation here means to aggressively--and literally--lay the groundwork for future cultivation of these lands. SMCRA calls for detailed reclamation plans before mining takes place, backed later by evaluations of how vegetation progresses up until the time of bond release--five years after mining ends. And though SMCRA has succeeded in improving the aesthetic appeal of post-mined sites, it does nothing to ensure that the most appropriate land use will be implemented for the long run.

According to Tim Probert, forester for one of the region's large landowners, "A lot of the regulators want to see reclamation that looks like a golf course." The first fairway at Augusta may be breathtakingly manicured, but nothing but grass grows on it.

In central Appalachia, most strip-mined surfaces have been reclaimed either as unmanaged forest or as "hayland/pasture," a term referring to land suitable for grazing. Much of the rest is designated as unmanaged forestland. Coal operators, who often don't own the land they mine, usually have only a short-term interest in land reclamation; most wish to meet the terms of bond release, satisfy the government regulators, and get out. Landowners and society, however, have a long-term interest in the land. The value of these forests will depend on whether or not reclamation is designed to enhance forest benefits.

Reclaiming for commercial forestry looks good on several counts:

* Appalachia was forested to begin with and likely will return to forest;

* On thousands of acres of land there, landowners could more usefully and profitably harvest trees than graze livestock;

* Reclaiming the land for forest would actually reduce the money mining companies now spend, because their greatest costs come from surface grading (forestland requires less grading than does hayland/pasture);

* Dense tree cover, like dense grass, prevents erosion;

* Commercial forestland should eventually stimulate local economies.

Local interest in reforestation burgeoned around 1980 with the creation of the Powell River Project (PRP), a joint venture between a landowner, Penn Virginia Resources Corporation, and a few Virginia Tech foresters. PRP, centered at the headwaters of the Powell River in Wise Count, Virginia, was the brainchild of C.B. Slemp. Having grown up in southwestern Virginia, Slemp worried that coal's days were numbered in a region whose identity was based almost entirely on the coal industry. He and others had witnessed the evolution of land use in Appalachia since SMCRA's enactment three years before, and felt the land often was being reclaimed fruitlessly.

PRP--today a consortium of local power and coal companies and state and federal agencies--is a research center and funding agency working to find alternative land uses in Virginia. It holds numerous workshops for foresters and regulators, bringing together people from industry, government, and academe. These days, Slemp is engineering the same research in Kentucky and formalizing ties among the states in central Appalachia's coal counties.

"In reality," says John Torbert, a Virginia Tech research associate who also is chairman of the American Society for Surface Mining and Reclamation's forestry and wildlife division, "people seldom use mined land later as hayland/pasture. So it's going to end up as forest anyway, through natural selection." Having watched reclaimed hayland/pasture abandoned and then invaded by low-value woody Species, Torbert and his compatriots now maintain that commercial forest on surface-mined land embodies the best collective interests of landowners, coal operators, and society in general.

Strict interpretation of SMCRA has encouraged coal operators to plant aggressive groundcovers. And these grasses have largely succeeded in reducing erosion. Woodlands, too, shut off erosion, but despite that face, current attitudes among government regulators actually discourage the use of trees in revegetating surface-mined land. Regulations in many states require merely 70 to 90 percent groundcover. But it seems that both coal operators and the regulators, in trying to meet SMCRA's requirements, have gradually become enchanted with the notion that they should establish a nearly 100 percent groundcover within reclamation's first year.

Landscapers usually revegetate with a mixture of Kentucky-31 tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Sel. Ky-31) and other species that produce a dense groundcover nearly right away. Such tall grasses keep sunlight off tree seedlings and compete with them for soil moisture. And they thwart something else a lot of us value: wildlife.

According to John Baker, a Virginia wildlife biologist, "Kentucky-31 tall fescue is not palatable to whitetail deer after it's a couple of years old. It forms a thick, tight sod cover through which young birds of such species as grouse, turkeys, and quail chicks cannot manipulate and go through their daily feeding activities."

The Pocahontas Land Corporation owns about half a million acres in Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky that were originally forested. The company regularly leases sections of these lands to coal operators, who reclaim it afterward according to the terms they agreed upon with Pocahontas while applying for mining permits.

According to Pocahontas forester Probert, "We had all this land you couldn't really farm, and we were paying taxes on it. Through natural selection, it might take a hundred years or more before it's commercially viable as forestland."

Probert and the Pocahontas people have been getting coal operators to reclaim sites for commercial forestland since 1990. "It'll be 35 or 40 years before it's merchantable," he says, indicating a time, interestingly, by which some experts estimate the region's coal will be exhausted. Asked how a corporation in a free-enterprise system can wait four decades to see its investment pay off, Probert says, "It'll generate revenue in the future, but it maintains your land value right now. Forestland is a lot more valuable than Kentucky-31."

Even the strip-mined land marked as eventual "unmanaged forest" doesn't produce the sort of timber it could if it were reclaimed properly. To produce maximum timber, it isn't enough just to plant trees; the land must be reclaimed so the trees grow well. Landowners need to let coal operators know they intend to manage the land for timber.

Foresters quantify the productive capability of a tract of land by what they call its site index (SI)--the height of most of a stand's tallest trees at a given age. A tract reclaimed for forest must eventually result in a high SI. Research has shown that if compaction is avoided and trees are planted in appropriate minesoils, the long-term growth should result in SI 100 after 50 years. Of course, it may take seven years (two years beyond bond release) to determine whether the stand is progressing properly. Harvestable tree volume increases exponentially with SI, because taller trees are also wider. In the central Appalachian region, where white pine (Pinus strobus) is the primary commercial tree species planted in minesoils, the PRP foresters believe the goal of reclamation should be to create land with an SI of 100 feet.

In reclaiming mined areas for hayland/pasture, bulldozers and tractors must flatten the land and enable a uniform grass to form. These vehicles plow over soil repeatedly--a significant expense in both time and money. Later, placing the final layers of overburden and topsoil on the surface, along with the subsequent grading, causes excessive compaction. Typically, haulers dump the final overburden or topsoil substitute on level areas and flatten it with bulldozers. Then, when another truck arrives with yet another load, it rolls over the area just leveled to dump its new load. That, too, will be spread and leveled by a bulldozer.

Planting and nurturing trees costs money. But the PRP researchers calculate that in reduced grading alone, coal operators can save about $500 an acre by reclaiming the land for commercial forestland rather than hayland/pasture.

The final step in reclaiming for hayland/pasture--called "tracking"--comes after a site has been smoothed over. A bulldozer rolls over the entire surface a final time, and its threads leave uniform dents perfect for groundcover. But this additional compaction presents problems. Digging a hole for a tree in compacted soil takes longer, and the planter is more likely to place the seedling improperly--either too loosely or by cutting off roots in order to fit the tree into a too-small hole. Trees planted on compacted soil in central Appalachia, if they survive, grow only a few inches a year. Trees planted on good minesoils grow one to two feet annually.

In rough-graded minesoils, on the other hand, trees are easier to plant, and they will grow better. And rocks and gullies benefit some wildlife species by creating cover and sites for dens.

Coal mining presents the opportunity to replace inherently shallow soils with deeper, more productive minesoils. In the Appalachians, natural soils tend to be shallow on ridges and slopes. But trees grow well in blasted rock, provided the right overburden is selected and is left uncompacted.

Landowners who have seen experiment plots at the PRP research center tend to be quickly impressed by the viability of commercial forestland as a post-mining land use. But the final hurdle may be impressing the inspectors. Smoothly contoured surfaces

might make an engineer proud. But to achieve that look, they require heavy compaction and grading. Then they don't support good tree growth once trees establish themselves. Compaction caused by leveling and grading can stunt tree growth for more than 30 years. Trees growing in deep, uncompacted minesoils surpass even tree growth in native, unmined soils.

So, how great is the payoff. The Powell River Project researchers present some eye-popping statistics.

They believe proper management could achieve an SI of 100 feet or more (for white pine) after 50 years on many reclaimed sites, through efforts to reduce compaction. This level of productivity would benefit the landowner much more than SI 80 (the average site quality for the southern Appalachians) or SI 65 (the average SI in southwest Virginia).

Take, for example, a stand of 450-per-acre white pines. Once it achieves an SI of 65, it will yield about 3,100 cubic feet of wood. On the other hand, if it achieves an SI 100, the yield increases to 8,600 cubic feet--an increase of 177 percent. The differences in productivity are even greater when you consider sawtimber volume instead of cubic volume. A 30-year-old stand on SI-100 land will yield 4.5 times as many board-feet as a stand on SI-65 land.

And then there's stumpage price. When you consider that large-diameter sawlogs sell for more money per thousand board-feet than small-diameter sawlogs, the actual timber-harvest value on SI-100 land increases yet again.

Federal legislation has caught up with, and largely corrected, the damage strip-mining does to the land. The time has come for land managers in central Appalachia to work within that legislation to make the best economic and environmental use of their property--by reclaiming the land for timber.

RECLAIMING for forestland rather than pasture saves man--and machine--hours. While land at left undergoes raining, a truck delivers soil for the final layer on surface-mined land nearby, dumping piles close together. Finally, a bulldozer arrives to knock tops from piles, but leaves soil loosely compacted--providing a good foundation for needlings and a good environment for wildlife. Reclaiming for pasture requires expensive and repetitious grading, which compacts the earth much more than the process shown here.

TREES TO RECAPTURE THE LAND

If the reclamation process creates minesoil conditions suitable for the establishment and growth of trees--that is, deep, nontoxic, and relatively uncompacted--it is almost inevitable that a productive and diverse forest will result, to provide environmental and economic benefits for future generations.

For example, eastern white pine, a native species commonly planted in the central Appalachian coal fields, can produce a large volume of marketable saw-timber in 30 years. Whether the trees are ever harvested or not, the new pine forest will provide many aesthetic and environmental benefits. Eventually, as the process of natural selection occurs, the pines will be replaced by other species seeding in from nearby forests, and it will be almost impossible to detect that mining had ever occurred there.

White pine isn't the only species suitable for mine-soils. In fact, a mixture of species should be planted. They should include both "crop" trees and "nurse" trees. Crop trees are dominant species that provide long-term forest cover. White pine is one example. In Kentucky and West Virginia, coal operators are planting red and white oak, white ash, yellow poplar, and sugar maple.

Nurse trees or nurse shrubs are relatively short-lived species that are interplanted with crop trees to benefit their growth. They are nitrogen-fixing species that can obtain their nitrogen from the atmosphere. The nitrogen ultimately becomes available to crop trees as the leaf litter from the nurse species decomposes. Nurse trees thus provide a biological source of fertilizer and slowly increase the mount of nitrogen in the soil.

Some common nurse-tree species are black locust, black alder, autumn olive, bicolor lespedeza, and indigo bush. Many of them provide rich food and cover for wildlife.

In addition to the trees that are planted, many more will invade naturally if a tree-compatible ground cover is used. Species with seed that is easily disseminated by wind or birds will become part of the reclaimed forest. Common examples of naturally regenerating species are yellow poplar, red maple, sourwood, black birch, black cherry, and numerous shrub species.

THE SAGA OF KRYVYI RIH 

The village of Kryvyi Rih (Kree-vee Ree), stretching 40 kilometers (25 miles) in one direction and only two kilometers across, lies across Ukraine's iron-mining country like a log. Historically, inhabitants of this severely strip-mined region have seen too much timber lying on its side. Citizens groups would like to see more standing upright.

Ninety-two percent of Ukraine's original tree cover is gone. Much of the deforestation came before 1920, but the extensive mining that began under Soviet rule accelerated it here.

When AMERICAN FORESTS' Gerry Gray and John Falconer visited Rih last September, they met citizens who claimed their town as the world's longest. But it was the size of the open-pit mines that astonished Gray and Falconer. Gray, who's from Minnesota, said he never saw mines along the Iron Range that compared to the ones in Ukraine. One was a quarter-mile deep.

Grassroots environmental groups, galvanized by such events as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the breakup of the Soviet Union, would like to reclaim this land for forests. They've done some experimental plantings, with minimal cooperation from mining companies. Unfortunately, there still aren't a lot of economic incentives for environmental conservation in this new republic struggling to establish itself. Commercial forestland could pay tremendous dividends in Ukraine within decades. But iron- and uranium-mining pay big bucks in a hurry.

THE WILDLIFE FACTOR

The environmental problems created by strip-mining are not limited to plants and soils. Nearly all wildlife flees an area left unvegetated after mining. How rapidly it returns depends on how the site is reclaimed. Before passage of the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, most long-term strip-mining damage came from watershed runoff. As surface and ground waters pass through mine wastes and abandoned mines, they dissolve sulfuric acid and toxic metals. The waters pick up these poisons and kill fish.

So how do strip-mined lands reclaimed for commercial forestland benefit fish and wildlife?

John Baker is wildlife biologist for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. "Siltation and acidization from mining put some fish on the endangered species list," he says. "With the advent of revegetation and improvements in drainage, reclamation has helped the fish."

Baker explains what can happen to an area after it's been disturbed: "People don't realize how dynamic forestland is. In 18 years, I've seen six natural disasters come through southwestern Virginia. The forest always comes back. Of course, it comes back faster if you assist it.

"If you leave strip-mined land alone, you'll see an oak and hickory forest a couple hundred years down the line--just from windblown seeds. Even if you reclaim it for commercial forestland, it's still going to take 40 years before it's thick forest. Meanwhile it'll be shrubland. What you'll get, as different areas in the region are being mined and then reclaimed, is a rotation of mining, revegetation, shrubland, and then forest. This is ideal for habitat diversity."

MICHAEL HOPPS--long-time freelancer, recently went straight. He now works full-time editing The Corps Report, a business newsletter that covers the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.