Monitoring water quality near Southwest Virginia coalfield restoration sites

Surface coal mining has, for some time, been a substantial land use alteration in the central Appalachian region, including Southwest Virginia. It's those operations that expose existing bedrock that then goes under increased weathering and leaches out ions, that increases the salinity of these headwater streams. And so up to 15 years now, we've been tracking the water quality with the ultimate goal of not just trying to understand the impacts, but more importantly, the timescales and the trajectory of potential recovery after those coal mining activities cease. So I think what motivates me to do this every single year is I have a personal connection to the area. So my family is from Southwest Virginia. And seeing that site, seeing those people and trying to keep that area for future generations is really important to me. It is one of the most biodiverse areas of the world. And especially on our eastern coast. So we are finding mayfly, stone flies, caddisflies and a bunch of other creatures, salamanders, crayfish. And it's really awesome to see when you're out in the stream. But the reason that we are studying them is because biodiversity is so important for the health of an ecosystem. So seeing some of our populations decrease over time or decrease because of the increasing salinity levels is really important for us to understand. we've lost roughly 30% of the taxa. The increases in salts or salinization results in the loss of certain aquatic insects that indicate that you have good or healthy streams. So if we lose these, one obvious alteration would just be their capacity to take energy, a carbon like leaf litter, and transfer up through the food web. No other animals can do that. And so that carbon stays locked in the microbial loop rather than being exported out across the watershed. One major takeaway from this research is that it's going to take some time, decades, or even up to 50 years for systems to recover following the surface coal mining operations in terms of both water quality and aquatic community composition.