Mountaintop removal is a mining practice whereby soil and rock from the tops of mountains are removed, allowing coal beneath to be reached. It is a practice already in use in southern West Virginia, as well as southeastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. When mining operations are finished for a given site, with the mountaintops gone and adjacent valleys filled, attempts are made at reclamation, or restoration, of the impacted area.

Although it is understandably impossible to restore the topographic and hydrologic integrity of impacted areas, reclamation operations have tried to revegetate the broad, flat areas left from mountaintop removal. To date, most success has been found for non-woody, particularly grass, species. For tree species, conifers have been generally more successful, in addition to some introduced hardwood species, such as the autumn olive.

Among the ultimate (and legally mandated) goals of such restoration efforts is to return the land to its pre-mining use. However, because forests of West Virginia are predominately composed of hardwood species, such as northern red oak, sugar maple, yellow poplar (DiGiovanni 1990), it appears that restoration efforts following mountaintop removal are falling short of these goals.

Implicit in restoration efforts is an assumption that it is, indeed, possible to re-create environmental conditions that will allow growth and survival of forest species native to West Virginia. Certainly, these have forests demonstrated a certain degree of resilience to several disturbances of varying intensities, including the heavy cutting and fires from railroad logging between the years 1880 to 1930 (Marquis and Johnson 1989), current clear-cutting practices (Gilliam, et al. 1995), and even acid deposition and ozone pollution (Gilliam, et al. 1994, Gilliam and Turrill 1995).

The harvesting of West Virginia forests initiates what ecologists call "secondary succession," wherein soil is left intact and generally high light-requiring species quickly colonize the disturbed area, being replaced after several years with species requiring less light to survive. Working at the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County, West Virginia, Gilliam et al. (1995) found that early successional species (i.e., in 20-year old stands) were black cherry, yellow poplar, and black locust. These were replaced by northern red oak and sugar maple in more mature stands (>80 years old). This composition may change more in the future, but the rate of change beyond 80-100 years should be rather low. In short, secondary succession in West Virginia forests may be complete in 80-100 years.

The challenge facing restoration of land leveled by mountaintop removal is that it initiates "primary succession," the result of a more catastrophic disturbance wherein the pre-disturbance soil is no longer present. Primary succession can require up to 10 fold more time to complete than secondary succession (Barbour, et al. 1999), i.e., it might take up to 1000 years to be completed. Furthermore, that assumes it will occur at all, or certainly return to the pre-disturbance state. The British Isles, that were once completely forested before being clear-cut during the initial invasion by the Romans, represent an excellent example of successional change that never returned to pre-disturbance conditions.

Accordingly, the purpose of this prospectus is to describe a general research approach to test the validity of the assumption that it will be possible to restore land areas altered by mountaintop removal in West Virginia. This theoretically would represent the first step in understanding the ecological interactions of plants occupying restored areas.

Research will be described here more qualitatively than quantitatively, pending availability of funds to support these efforts. That is, I will describe the general approach that could be taken without the experimental designs to make manipulations and gather data, along with appropriate statistical tests for data analysis.

This basic experimental substrate will be fill material taken from one to several (again, depending on amount of funding available) mountaintop removal restoration sites. This material will be brought back to the Plant and Soil Analytical Laboratory in the Department of Biological Sciences at Marshall University. Sub-samples of this material will be subjected to routine extraction procedures used to determine availability of essential plant nutrients in the soil. These would include nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, and calcium. In addition, this material will be analyzed for chemical ions that are potentially toxic to plant roots, namely aluminum and manganese.

Other sub-samples of fill material will be added to greenhouse growth pots. There will be two initial independent (i.e., manipulated) variables: organic matter and species. Once again, the number of levels chosen for each variable will depend on the amount of available funding, for the number of treatment combinations increases geometrically with the levels of each variable. For example, one level of organic matter treatment (e.g., 10% addition to the fill material) would, along with an untreated control, yield two categories of planting medium (i.e., one control and one organic matter addition). When that is combined with two tree species to be tested (e.g., black cherry and yellow poplar), it yields a 2 X 2 design, or a total of four treatment combinations. In addition, there would also need to be several replications to each treatment combinations.

Whatever the level of inquiry, this type of research will help answer several heretofore unaddressed questions: (1) what is the chemical make-up of fill material in the context of being a plant growth medium? (2) will trees grow in fill material? (3) if so, can all trees grow? (4) is organic matter content an important mitigating factor for tree growth in fill material? (5) if so, what level of organic matter is necessary for supporting tree growth?

Barbour, M.G., J.H. Burk, W.D. Pitts, F.S. Gilliam, and M.W. Schwartz. 1999. Terrestrial plant ecology. Third edition. Benjamin/Cummings, Menlo Park, California, USA.

DiGiovanni, D.M. 1990. Forest statistics for West Virginiaù1975 and 1989. USDA Forest Service Research Bulletin NE-114, Radnor, PA.

Gilliam, F.S. and Turrill, N.L. 1995. Temporal patterns of ozone pollution in West Virginia: implications for high-elevation hardwood forests. Journal of Air and Waste Management Association 45:621-626.

Gilliam, F.S., Turrill, N.L., and Adams, M.B. 1995. Species composition and patterns of diversity in herbaceous layer and woody overstory of clearcut versus mature central Appalachian hardwood forests. Ecological Applications 5:947-955.

Gilliam, F.S., Turrill, N.L., Aulick, S.D., Evans, D.K., and Adams, M.B. 1994. Herbaceous layer and soil response to experimental acidification in a central Appalachian hardwood forest. Journal of Environmental Quality 23:835-844.