Restoring Sustainable Forests on Appalachian Mined Lands for Wood Products, Renewable Energy, Carbon Sequestration, and Other Ecosystems Services

The overall purpose of this project is to evaluate the biological and economic feasibility of restoring high-quality forests on mined land, and to measure carbon sequestration and wood production benefits that would be achieved from forest restoration procedures. During this quarter we worked on methodologies for analyzing carbon in mine soils. A unique property of mine soils is the presence of coal and carboniferous rock particles that are present in mine soils in various sizes, quantities, and qualities. There is no existing method in the literature that may be of use for quantitative estimation of soil organic carbon (SOC) in mine soils that can successfully differentiate between pedogenic and geogenic carbon forms. In this report we present a detailed description of a 16-step method for measuring SOC in mine soils designed for and tested on a total of 30 different mine soil mixtures representing a wide spectrum of mine soils in the hard-rock region of the Appalachian coalfield. The proposed method is a combination of chemical procedure for carbonates removal, a thermal procedure for pedogenic C removal, and elemental C analysis procedure at 900 C. Our methodology provides a means to correct for the carbon loss from the more volatile constituents of coal fragments in the mine soil samples and another correction factor for the protected organic matter that can also remain unoxidized following thermal pretreatment. The correction factors for coal and soil material-specific SOM were based on carbon content loss from coal and SOM determined by a parallel thermal oxidation analysis of pure ground coal fragments retrieved from the same mined site as the soil samples and of coal-free soil rock fragments of sandstone and siltstone origin