Reclamation - restoring disturbed lands

I tend to avoid posting theses due to their length, but this one is a good one for showing how capping depth tends to have a sweet spot around 15 cm or so.

Pinno looks at intensively planting Alder trees in the oil sands, similar to myawagi method

There is enough arsenic trioxide to kill every person on earth several times over

Thw plan entails using Thernosyphons to freeze the ground to entomb the contaminant (section 2). What I like about this is that it is passive, and it is self-healing. Any water that gets close improves the barrier.

The idea that they are relying on permafrost is somewhat scary.

This is a really good article on why end pit lakes are used, and the challenges associated with them.

In general, EPLs are useful to safely store waste rock or other media that are metal leaching/acid(ML/ARD) generating. They do this through preventing oxidization and geochemical weathering. You can see how bad this issue can be

https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:41b4f446-511f-33dd-9ae9-47ddeb47ccb2

In this case, pH was measured as -3.6 in some of their mine contact water. yuck.

Not sure if this is the right place for this but I thought it was cool.

Part of successful reclamation is to have a gdochemically stable landscape. This entails water management, as this is the primary receiving matrix for geochem leachate.

Also potential use buildings https://newatlas.com/energy/lift-energy-skyscraper-batteries/?itm_source=newatlas&itm_medium=article-body

Larney is a brilliant scientist; a leader in Reclamation. This is a good overview of the role of organic amendments in reclamation

Climate change has serious implications on post-closure ecosystems. This article talks about some ways to adapt to climate change's impact, by selecting spp. that can tolerate a wide range of conditions, using ex situ collection to preserve and create new populations of rare plant spp. etc.

What do you do when you don't have soil? Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence in mining; particularly on older sites.

short article, some good information on the benefits of alder in the ecosystem, and getting the planting rates right

Really good read

I'm not sure if this c/ is the best place to post this or not. But this was a really good read! It ties together historical concepts of permaculture, ecological resiliency, and present day indigenous land rights.

A large part of reclamation is centred around (end) land use. What will our site be once we are done with it?

As such. I'm a huge proponent of efficient and intelligent land use planning; something that is not happening in Canada. A large portion of Alberta is situated on extremely fertile Chernozemic soil order (Mollisols for you US folks), yet we are paving and building over them at an alarming rate. Same goes with the Ontario region, which is what they are getting at with the Golden Horseshoe (those are Melaninc Brunisols, but functionally similar to Chernozems).

The breaking and cultivation of the parts of the fringes boreal forest was difficult for pioneers and homesteaders; they found out the hard way which areas could successfully be brought under production or not. Yet even the areas where agriculture failed are quite fertile in the grand scheme of things. Soil organic matter tends to stick around in Canada and the nothern states; not so in tropical and desert environments. Deforestation in the Amazon is driven in part by the push for agriculture, yet these soils are marginal at best for agriculture. Tropical soils absorb Phosphorus like a vampire does blood, and because of the temperature, soil organic matter is mineralized at a ridiculously fast rate. Farmers down that way would kill for the soils we pave over; even the shitty ones.

I suppose my point is to take a long hard look at your site's soil baseline data. It is the foundation on which your reclaimed ecosystem/land use will be built upon. Even if you do everything right, it's going to take a long time to get back to where things started before a dozer went through the area. Follow the best management practices carefully, as being in a situation where you're short on soil is unenviable.

/Rant

Org based in Portland, Oregon USA that turns parking lots back to paradise.

Another main goal for reclamation is to restore the landscape so that it ties into the surrounding, undisturbed landscape and to bring back the ecosystems that were obliterated during human activity. To do this, reclamation practitioners must consider the species they will use during revegetation. While some species may occur in undisturbed locations, and we may want them to come back, planting or seeding them may not be feasible. In most cases, a lot of the native vegetation we want is not available commercially, so we're forced to make due with which native species ARE available or locally collect these seeds ourselves, which is very time consuming.

The general steps for species selection are:

1. determine which species are common to each site series and those that existed on the landscape
2. review guidance documents (government?) and consider dominant overstory and understorey species for area we intend to reclaim
3. determine which species are commercially available, or easily harvested - these will become the foundation of our revegetation prescription
4. Plant the species. In some cases, we may want to intensively plant in some locations, creating vegetation islands. If there are existing areas of natural vegetation, we also want to try and protect these from degrading as they are an important source of seeds.
5. monitor the recovery of our planted species; adapt our strategy if things aren't going well
6. test the efficacy of our new list at another location. If we got it right the first time, keep revegetating
7. continue to adapt our strategy as we learn new things.

A common goal in the reclamation of disturbed lands is for wildlife to return to pre-disturbance levels. Artificial refuges are a way to help this process but must be constructed carefully. This article looks at their use

Basic concept, but a useful article to reference