Mine reclamation

[1] Mine reclamation creates useful landscapes that meet a variety of goals, ranging from the restoration of productive ecosystems to the creation of industrial and municipal resources.

Exceptions are provided when a community or surface owner is in need of flat or gently rolling terrain.

Acceptable post-mining land uses include commercial, residential, recreational, agricultural or public facility improvements.

[5][6] In some situation even spontaneous ecosystem development may result in reasonable forest cover[7][8] but in most cases specific restoration approaches are used.

[5][6] Within the past decade, a new approach to reforestation—the Forestry Reclamation Approach, or FRA—has been promoted by state mining agencies and the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) as an appropriate and desirable method for reclaiming coal-mined land to support forested land uses under SMCRA.

[10] The FRA establishes guidelines for achieving successful reforestation on mined lands, and can be summarized in the following five steps: When the top successional species for the local environment is not forest due to local microclimate conditions, reclamation may be better accomplished by establishing rangeland instead.

Once those first three steps are accomplished and well-established, the livestock grazing can be reduced or eliminated to allow medium and higher successional species to take root and continue the forestry approach.

[22] In view of the end of coal mining in Germany in 2018, the Research Institute of Post-Mining (FZN) was set up at the Technische Hochschule Georg Agricola (THGA) in Bochum in 2015.

[23][24] It is the very first institute of its kind in the world, which takes a holistic view of the consequences of mining, and pools the know-how required, in order to shape the post-mining period from a technical, economic and environmental perspective.

[23] The Research Institute of Post-Mining develops monitoring processes both at the pithead and below ground and prepares the scientific principles for a sustainable pit water concept.

It also runs its own knowledge management project, which is intended to make mining and post-mining know-how available in a database.