A Spatial Application of A Vegetation Productivity Equation for Neo-Sol Reconstruction

摘要

Reclamation specialists are interested in the application of recently developed soil productivity equations for post-mining reclamation planning and design. Thsi paper presents the application of one recently developed soil productivity equation to a surface coal mine site in Mercer County, North Dakota. Geographic information systems (GIS) technology (Map ~*Factory 1.1) was combined with a soil productivity equation developed by the author to generate a GIS script to calculate a site's pre-mining productivity per 10 meter grid cell and then summed to calcualte the grand and the expected average soil productivity for the site, resulting in a pre-mining baseline numerical spatial scores. Several post-mining alternatives were evalauted to study various soil management strategies to restore post-mining soil productivity, including: an abandoned mine landscape treatment, a reconstructed topsoil treatment with graded gentle slopes, and a reconstructed topsoil treatment with soil improvements. The resutls indicated that the abandoned mine scenario was significantly differnet htan hte other three treatments (p<0.05), with the reconstructed topsoil treatment with soil amendments generating the greatest estimated productivity.