Paywall for the article.
You'd be surprised how difficult it is to get trees planted in a reclaimation project. Not planting the trees....but getting around bureaucracy.
Some of my Forester friend have been working with some projects in eastern Ohio. They find it is cheaper, causes less erosion and establishes more desirable long-term habitat to use a practice called "end dumping". They simply dymp the top soil back and leave it. No grading, dozing, or compacting. Plant trees (or not) and you'll have a successful forest in a decade.
Why doesn't this happen more often? The state will not release the bond when they reclaim the ground like that. Instead, if they flatten that dirt over and over again with the d9 run over it with a sheep foot and throw some Kentucky 31 on it, the company gets her bond back and moves on. (A lot of the soil moves on as well....)
This will be great places to restore American chestnuts and there are some projects where that is happening. Is the article about those? There are also projects where they go back in old reclaim sites where soil was heavily compacted and run a subsoiler and plant trees. That works, but not nearly as well as uncompacted soil. None of that is surprising to an arborist.
@ATH
Try this. I cut & pasted into a Word Doc.
At Old Coal Mines, the American Chestnut Tries for a Comeback
Across Appalachia, scientists and foresters are trying to reintroduce a hybrid version, helping to revive damaged land while also bringing back a beloved tree.
Michael French inspecting progress at a former mine in eastern Ohio.
By
Elena Shao
Photographs by Maddie McGarvey
Sept. 16, 2022
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ohio — Michael French trudged through a thicket of prickly bramble, unfazed by the branches he had to swat away on occasion in order to arrive at a quiet spot of hilly land that was once mined for coal. Now, however, it is patched with flowering goldenrods and long yellow-green grasses and dotted with tree saplings.
The sight, he acknowledged, would seem unimpressive to most. Yet it might be Mr. French’s most prized accomplishment. To him, the young trees symbolize what could be a critical comeback for some of the country’s vanishing forests, and for one tree in particular, the American chestnut.
“I don’t see it how most people see it,” he said. “I look at this and I see how it’s going to be in 80 to 100 years.”
By then, Mr. French envisions that the chestnut, a beloved tree nearly wiped out a century ago by a blight-causing fungus, will be among those that make up an expansive forest of native trees and plants.
Billions of chestnuts once dominated Appalachia, with Americans over many generations relying on their hardy trunks for log cabins, floor panels and telephone poles. Families would store the trees’ small, brown nuts in attics to eat during the holiday season.
Now, Mr. French and his colleagues at Green Forests Work, a nonprofit group, hope to aid the
decades-long effort to revive the American chestnut by bringing the trees back onto Appalachia’s former coal mines. Decades of mining, which have contributed to global warming, also left behind dry, acidic and hardened earth that made it difficult to grow much beyond nonnative herbaceous plants and grasses.
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As
coal continues to decline and many of the remaining mines shut down for good, foresters say that restoring mining sites is an opportunity to prove that something productive can be made of lands that have been degraded by decades of extractive activity, particularly at a moment when trees are
increasingly valued for their climate benefits. Forests can capture planet-warming emissions, create safe harbor for endangered wildlife species and make ecosystems more resilient to extreme weather events like flooding.
Image
The Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, where once-mined areas are being restored.
Image
Michael French, Director of Operations of Green Forests Work, looks through a chestnut bur, which contains the developing chestnuts, in the Coshocton County Conservation Innovation Grant planting, also known as the Brannon Homeplace on August 16, 2022. It is owned by the Brannon family and was surface mined over many decades, with the most recent being in the mid-1990s. The purpose of the progeny test was to help The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) determine which family lines of their potentially blight resistant chestnuts would have higher levels of disease resistance while displaying primarily American chestnut form, growth rates, and other characteristics. The surrounding 30 acres were to help determine how TACF’s potentially blight resistant chestnuts performed when competing against oaks, poplar, cherry, hickories, and other native species that are commonly used for mined land reforestation projects. NYTCREDIT: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
The chestnut is a good fit for this effort, researchers say, because the tree’s historical range overlaps “almost perfectly” with the terrain covered by former coal mines that stretched across parts of eastern Kentucky and Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.
Another advantage of restoring mining sites this way is that chestnut trees prefer slightly acidic growth material, and they grow best in sandy and well-drained soil that isn’t too wet, conditions that are mostly consistent with previously mined land, said Carolyn Keiffer, a plant ecologist at Miami University in Ohio.
Since 2009, Green Forests Work has helped plant more than five million native trees, including tens of thousands of chestnuts, across 9,400 acres of mined lands. Over that time, the group has collected supporters, including U.S. Forest Service rangers trying to bring back the red spruce onto national forests in West Virginia, and bourbon companies interested in the sustainability of white oak trees that are used in barrels to store and age whiskey.
www.nytimes.com
