The Center for Conservation Innovation at Defenders of Wildlife has completed analyses quantifying whether a causal relationship can be identified between mountaintop removal mining activities in Appalachia and a degradation in water quality for aquatic species. We are interested in this relationship as it pertains to two intersecting environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Clean Water Act.
Under the ESA, federal agencies must ensure that their actions do not jeopardize the existence of species listed as threatened or endagered on the endagered species list (hereafter ‘listed species’). Often they accomplish this by consulting with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which implements the ESA, on the impacts proposed projects and regulations pose to listed species. The permitting and regulation of surface mines in the United States is governed by the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA). In 1996, the US Fish and Wildlife Service consulted on a set of regulations and procedures by which state regulatory authorities could issue mining permits under SMCRA. In the Service’s judgement, these procedures were sufficient to prevent the jeopardization of listed species potentially affected by mining activity.
The Clean Water Act is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and is the primary federal law governing water pollution. Among other regulations, the Clean Water Act requires states to develop water quality standards for waterways to meet different usage criteria, one being suitability for aquatic life. If these standards are consistently not met a waterway may be designated as impaired under section 303(d). The water quality standards thus represent an agreed upon set of thresholds necessary to maintain suitability of waterways for aquatic life.
This report aims to answer the question as to whether the creation and operation of mountaintop removal mines impair the conservation and recovery of aquatic listed species. We address this goal by analyzing three relationships:
We obtained spatial data delineating the footprints of all large surface mines across central Appalachia in each year from 1985 to 2015. These data come from a previous analysis measuring trends in the extent of mining activities over time, conducted by a partner organization SkyTruth. In order to avoid commission errors in mine identification affecting subsequent analyses, we cross-referenced these footprints with each year of available data from the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), and eliminated all footprints that overlapped with areas flagged as agriculture or development
We used these mine footprints to define our study area as a contiguous selection of all the US counties overlapping these mines.