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riff 



Figure 26— Topsoil being spread on regraded spoil at Seminoe 2 mine in Wyoming. Topsoil is dumped from trucl<s along the 

 ridge and spread in two directions by a bulldozer. Grass and forbs in the foreground represent several seasons of growth on 

 similarly reclaimed land. Long, steep slopes such as this one do not always fit into the natural landscape and, in places, 

 have been eroded more readily than the gentle slopes in the foreground. Mining, marked by spoil piles in the background 

 (right side), is proceeding away from the observer. October 1978. 



hard to collect and will be expensive. Although 

 the number of seed collectors and growers of 

 transplants and container plants has increased 

 (Crofts and McKell, 1977), their locations are not 

 always known to mining management person- 

 nel. Many seed firms do not routinely stock the 

 desired seed but collect or grow it only on order. 

 Locating plants or seeds that are genetically 

 adapted to the growing site presents an addi- 

 tional complication because seed from a warm 

 or dry site may not perform as well in a cold or 

 moist site (Thornburg and Fuchs, 1978, p. 413). 

 Monsen and Plummer (1978, p. 173) believe that 

 expanded efforts are needed to produce enough 

 seed and transplanting materials to meet the 

 large-scale reclamation needs of western coal 

 development. 



If a mining company wants to reproduce a 

 specific plant community, the company may find 



that seed or planting stock for many species is 

 unavailable commercially. Such species can be 

 reintroduced from seed or root stock pieces in 

 the topsoil or may eventually be blown onto the 

 site from the outside (Wagner and others, 1978), 

 but odds favor a long time to develop a plant 

 community by these means. In greenhouse 

 studies, Beauchamp and others (1975) found 

 substantial amounts of viable seed from succes- 

 sional type plants in the top 2 inches of Wyo- 

 ming topsoils; comparatively little seed, how- 

 ever, was present from the permanent plant 

 species that dominated the sites. Introduction of 

 aggressively competitive, mostly annual suc- 

 cesstional species has been considered a nega- 

 tive aspect of topsoiling (Hodder, 1978, p. 152; 

 Frischknecht and Ferguson, 1979, p. 24). 



The possibility of collecting seed or trans- 

 plants of specific species from adjacent un- 



41 



