this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Reclamation - restoring disturbed lands

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This reclamation is 10 years old and no soil was placed - these are going directly into waste rock. This is high elevation, so the trees grow slowly

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

why mound like that

Rough mounding is used for three reasons:

  1. Slow water movement, and reduce erosion
  2. improve water retention on the slope for the plants
  3. Create a divers micro-topography that results in more microsites for a wide variety of plants to grow. Some do good on the tops of hummocks, while the the more shade and thirstier spp. do well in the hollows.

Big game

They certainly have a role, but I think there's a lot more preferential browsing sources for them in the surrounding areas, rather than this area. It's just recovering, and doesn't likely offer that great of a food source for them, when there are old growth forests near by.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is interesting! Do you have any data concerning the effectiveness of this method and would you be willing to share it? I’d be interested to incorporate that into work.

As for big game, we found that especially young growths are a source of nutrition for red, roe and fallow deer, as well as several other species, all that f which tend to preferentially browse newly established forests. Several forestry certific have incorporated proper game management in their national standards because of these experiences in Germany.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Here is a little PDF on the method by the guy who developed it

here's a paper by him.
2012 paper

you can do rough mounding a couple ways; another way is to just have humps of topsoil, if you don't want to admix your soils, and it works pretty well. I've seen the results first hand.

preferentially browse

We've seen this too, over here; they'll come in and eff up our sites, but it didn't happen here, probably because it's kind of in the middle of the mine.