After driving winding, remote dirt roads in total darkness, Steven Price and his colleagues stand among the frozen morning dew under the shadow of the remaining red spruce stands. They watch as the sun peeks over the shoulder of the dark silhouette of a mountain, painting the sky a vibrant pink. The Monongahela Mountains are filled with damp wisps of fog, and the songs of mourning warblers (Geothlypis philadelphia) begin to fill the air with hope.
The Appalachian Mountains are one of the oldest mountain ranges on Earth. But decades of surface mining have reshaped the ecology and geology alike across the landscape of states like West Virginia. Steven Price, a professor at the University of Kentucky, and his collaborators have found that native bird communities are beginning to return to restored legacy mine sites when specific restoration practices are used.
Surface mine reclamation aims to reduce the consequences of mining coal by adding vegetation back to the mountainside and restoring the area’s original shape. Mining companies are required to restore the landscape and often turn to one of two techniques: turning the space into grasslands or using the Forestry Reclamation Approach (FRA), which focuses on native plantings and reducing soil compaction. Meanwhile, a huge number of other former mines never receive restoration treatment, as they were either abandoned before such legal requirements existed or because mining companies declared bankruptcy or went defunct before mine land reclamation. These sites are left to restore themselves through succession.
In a study published recently in Ecosphere, Price and his collaborators wanted to know whether sites restored with the FRA are really starting to function like natural young forests, supporting native bird species over time. They also asked how these restored areas compared with areas left to regrow without restoration and the spaces where the ecosystem had not been disturbed.
Mountaintop removal to mountaintop restoration
From 2018 to 2021, Green Forests Work, a nonprofit reforesting organization, planted over 92,000 native trees and shrubs across 68 hectares of Sharp Knob and Mower Tract, legacy mine lands in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. The nonprofit also conducted non-native species removal, soil decompaction, added seasonal wetlands and downed logs to provide wildlife habitat.
Price and his collaborators compared bird communities in sites restored via the FRA with mine sites that had not been actively restored and unmined areas. The team surveyed breeding bird communities at sites two to five years and eight to 11 years post-FRA restoration. The researchers conducted bird counts on reclaimed mine lands where trees were still getting established; older sites where restoration methods had nearly a decade to take hold; naturally regrowing mine lands; and matured, unmined forests.
Price and his collaborators found that sites that had only been restored for two to five years prior to the study were already filled with birds that prefer shrubby, young red spruce-hardwood forests. They found three indicator species—chestnut-sided warbler (Setophaga pensylvanica), dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis), and mourning warbler—in both younger and older FRA sites. The study’s findings suggest that these ecologically restored areas are working as real habitat for native breeding birds, even after only about a decade of growth.
What surprised Price was that mine lands that were not actively restored did little for bird communities. “Simply leaving these areas alone and hoping forests come back isn’t enough,” he said. “From what we found, it would likely take a very long time before bird use starts to look like what we see in either young forests or mature ones.”
Price believes these differences in bird communities are likely because forests resulting from the FRA were intentionally managed for growing red spruce-hardwood forests. As these forests continue to mature, they’ll likely attract even more species that depend on older, fully developed forests.
“It’s much easier for colonization to happen when you have adjacent patches of the natural ecosystem in close proximity as we do in the Monongahela National Forest. We might see something very different if we tried to do this study and you’re surrounded by parking lots,” noted Price.
Price also said that the benefits are not limited to birds. His group has also found improvements in water quality as well and more bats and frogs in FRA-restored areas, demonstrating some hope in these heavily degraded landscapes.
Article by Kaylyn Zipp
