Do Appalachian Herbaceous Understories Ever Recover from Clearcutting?
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The following is an abstract from a study by David Cameron Duffy and Albert J. Meier at the Institurte of Ecology at the University of Georgia. The study appeared in Conservation Biology, Volume 6, No. 2, June 1992. Thanks to Dr.Frosty Levy of East Tennessee State University for bringing this study to my attention. For those who wish to see the full study and don’t have access to this journal, send a SASE to the editor for a copy.
Abstract: Life history characteristics of many herbaceous understory plants suggest that such species recover slowly from major perturbations such as clear cutting We examined herbaceous cover and richness in the understories of nine primary ("old- growth ") forests in the southern Appalachian foundations and of nine comparable secondary forests, ranging in age from 45 to 87 years since clear cutting. Neither cover nor richness increased with age in the secondary forests.
This suggests three possibilities: (1) that recovery is so slow or variable among sites that 87 years is insufficient time to detect it; (2) that such forests will never recover to match remnant primary forests because climatic conditions are different today than when the forests became established; or (3) that herbaceous plants colonize pit and mound microtopography caused by the death of trees, so that recovery must await the growth death, and decomposition of the trees of the secondary forest.
Whatever the mechanism, herbaceous understory communities in the mixed-mesophytic forests of the Appalachians appear unlikely to recover within the present planned logging cycles of 40 – 150 years, suggesting a future loss of diversity of understory herbaceous plants.
The statistics of strip mine abuse numb the mind and overwhelm the spirit. Over the last twenty years [this quote was from a publication published in 1990],has disturbed almost two millions acres of land: only half that land has been reclaimed even to minimum standards. More than 264,000 acres of cropland, 135,000 acres of pasture and 127,800 acres of forest have been lost ...
Across the United States, more than 11,000 miles of streams have been polluted by sediment or acid from surface and underground mining combined. Some 29,000 acres of reservoirs and impoundments have been seriously damaged by strip mining. Strip mining has created at least 3000 miles of landslides and left some 34,500 miles of highwalls. At the time the Surface Mining & control reclamation Act was passed in 1977, two-thirds of the land that had been mined for coal had been left unreclaimed.
– From the Strip Mining Handbook by Mark Squillace. Publisher: Friends of the Earth & Environmental Policy Institute, 1990