USDA: "Restoring Appalachian Soils..."

Shrubby fields have replaced large swaths of forests, both as a result of mining and subsequent efforts to restore the land after mining. These shrublands have proven to be so resistant to change that some refer to their condition as "arrested" ecological succession. By one expert’s estimate, as much as a million acres—an area slightly smaller than the state of Delaware—of former deciduous, temperate forest are devoid of the trees that once thrived there.

One of the problems, according to Dr. James Burger, Professor Emeritus with Virginia Tech, is that mining turned the soils upside down. The soil in which trees grew best was buried, leaving a completely different soil type on top when the land was flattened. "The inverted soil profile can make a poor basis for reforestation," Burger said. "Not only did trees grow poorly, but invasive species were also able to take root and capture the landscape. As a result, we’ve lost the original productivity and diversity of the native forest."

Thanks to decades of research by soil scientists and foresters, help from volunteers and funding from state and federal governments and from private sources including coal operators, forests are beginning to return to the mined land of the Appalachians. Organizations such as the Appalachian Regional Restoration Initiative have been instrumental in developing guidelines for restoring these drastically disturbed lands. The Forestry Reclamation Approach provides five steps to successful reforestation – including how to get the soil "right". With funding from the Appalachian Regional Commission, an organization called Green Forest Works is working to re-establish healthy and productive forests on formerly mined lands in Appalachia. More than 9,000 Green Forest Works volunteers have planted more than one million trees on nearly 2,000 acres of former mined land since 2009.

In addition, along with other organizations, Green Forest Works is reforesting 1,000 acres of reclaimed mine land with American chestnut, a native species that was found throughout Appalachia until it was devastated by a fungal disease in the early 20th century. The American Chestnut Society, which has donated trees for use in recovering mined land, Forest Service scientists and many others have developed a strain of American chestnut tree that tolerates the disease that nearly wiped the species out a century ago.