Cattails are frequently one of the principal indigenous plant~ which colonize wet areas of tailings, whether on extremely alkaline surfaces or in highly acidic conditions. However the stands are often small and their expansion is limited to small sections of the tailings beach or only pockets of cattail stands on drier areas on the sites. The objective of the present work was to address expansion of existing cattail populations currently growing in these two contrasting pH environments associated with tailings areas.
Experiments were implemented to ascertain some of the factor(s) which controls cattail plant growth on the tailings areas belonging to Ince Ltd., Sudbury, Ontario, which were partially covered with pyrrhotite and partially with alkaline mine slimes. Other experiments investigated cattail stand expansion as well as methods of introducing cattails into areas where they were not currently growing.
A useful indicator of the potential for cattail stand to expand is the ratio of the number of juvenile individuals to the number of mature individuals around the stand perimeter. In cattail stands where rhizomes were deep and the waste material compacted, the ratio was about 0.2; in a stand where the rhizomes were shallow and overlying wastes were not compacted, the ratio was 0.5.