Study: Damaged Land Can Repair Itself

A scoured landscape like this gravel pit in Washington State can experience significant regeneration and re-vegetation if left alone to recover, a recent study finds.
Photo: www.asphaltwa.com

The study by Czech researchers appears in the journal Restoration Ecology.

Nature’s Repair Job

There is widespread interest in restoring land damaged by gravel-sand mining and other harsh uses, but the high costs of such projects can be off-putting. The study in Restoration Ecology offers new evidence that these damaged environments can be effectively restored within a matter of years, at little or even no cost.

According to the study, damaged sites can be restored without human interference by spontaneous re-vegetation (or vegetation succession), whereby plants from the area surrounding disused gravel-sand pits move in and take root. Simply by leaving abandoned mines alone they will naturally restore themselves within just 25 years.

Native Plants Reseed

These findings have major repercussions for the way in which restoration projects are considered around the world. Rather than debating the relative costs and benefits of such projects, the evidence of spontaneous re-vegetation found in this study may render financial considerations unnecessary. In fact, besides removing invasive plant species before allowing re-vegetation to begin, human involvement in reclamation is not needed.

“Instead of using expensive technical reclamations it is possible to rely more upon spontaneous succession then is generally expected,” says lead author Klára Øehounková. “For this, it is important to preserve at least some remnants of natural vegetation during mining and post-mining operations to act as seed sources of many target species.”

Sources: Restoration Ecology (academic journal), Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.