Restoring Land for Native Plants, Bees and Streams
Elevation and topographical changes aside, reclaimed mountaintop removal sites look nothing like what was there before. Natural forests are gone, replaced mostly by grasslands and non-native vegetation. While these plants grow quickly and help stabilize the land that was stripped bare and compacted during the mining and reclamation process, they don’t provide anything close to the same type of habitat or ecological value of the forests they replace.
A new nonprofit organization, born out of the bankruptcies of Alpha Natural Resources and Patriot Coal, is hoping to bring native forests back to these lands, and restore streams that can support native aquatic life and insects.
“We are planning to restore approximately 250 acres over the next three to four years on unreclaimed mine sites, or sites that have been reclaimed but aren’t successfully growing native forests,” says Mike Becher, an attorney working for Appalachian Headwaters.
Appalachian Headwaters launched last year, funded by bankruptcy settlements with Alpha and Patriot to ensure those companies would live up to their environmental cleanup obligations.
....Workers will plant thousands of trees — 300 to 400 trees per acre, Becher says.
The three nonprofit groups also jointly secured a $1.5 million grant from an Appalachian Regional Commission economic diversity initiative. That grant is funding work to bolster the region’s bee and native plant population.
This project will help train displaced Appalachian miners and other workers as beekeepers and provide financial startup assistance to get them started, as well as processing, marketing and packaging honey and other products. Others will be employed to collect seeds and grow native plants that aren’t available in most regional nurseries.
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http://appvoices.org/2017/06/15/appheadwaters/
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