| The Beaver Creek watershed, a Mid-Appalachian watershed, located in Tucker County, West Virginia, was heavily impacted by coal mining and subsequently reclaimed by reforestation and revegetation. A stream monitoring study was conducted from 2000 to 2006 for the streams in the watershed to investigate the impact of land reclamation by reforestation and revegetation on water quality and macroinvertebrates. GIS tools and multivariate statistical analyses were applied to characterize land cover assess temporal trends of the stream conditions and examine the linkages among water quality, land cover, and biotic condition. In the entire watershed, 16% of land was disturbed mine land which was reclaimed by reforestation (5%) and revegetation (11%). Based on assessment of water quality, acid mine drainage was still the dominant factor leading to the overall poor water quality (low pH, high sulfate and metals) in the watershed after reclamation was completed more than 20 years ago. Stream biotic conditions were poor to very poor in moderately and intensively mining impacted sub-watersheds. Nonetheless, statistically significant improvement trends were observed for some water quality variables including conductivity, sulfate, Fe, and Mn in the entire watershed during the study period, which indicated that reclamation by reforestation and revegetation improved water quality over time. The lack of pH improvement in the watershed was due to the proton generation during metal precipitation and poor buffering capacity of the impacted streams. Furthermore, statistical analyses showed that strong correlations existed in the mine drainage-impacted watershed between land cover and water quality, between land cover and stream biotic health, and between water quality and stream biotic health. These linkages suggested that future development in the watershed should involve good reclamation practices to minimize adverse mine drainage impact and restore the integrity of the ecosystem. |
