Assessing the Long-term Ecosystem Productivity Benefits and Potential Impacts of Forests Re-established on a Mine Tailings Site

Authors
Juha Metsaranta
Suzanne Beauchemin
Sean Langley
Bryan Tisch
Phyllis Dale
Resource Date:
2018

It can be really hard to get plants and trees to grow on former mine sites, especially if the soil is contaminated by the mining waste material, which is called tailings. In an area of mine tailings near Sudbury, Ontario, trees have been successfully growing for the last 30–40 years after a lot of work was done to improve the growing conditions. From trees growing on the tailings, we extracted core samples and then measured the width of the annual rings. We put that information into a computer model called the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS3) to calculate how fast the trees were growing and how much carbon was being stored in the forest. The trees were growing relatively quickly and the site was accumulating carbon in both the trees and the soil faster than expected. It took about 10 years to make up the amount of carbon that was put into the air by all the activities that were needed to get the trees growing. The amount of toxic metal in the soil under the trees was pretty high, and so getting the trees to grow fixed only some of the environmental problems at the site.