Laserfiche WebLink
i~ <br />' Kent Gorham <br />' May 4, 2005 <br />Page 4 <br />I' Herbaceous Production Sampling <br />I' Herbaceous production samples on the two reclaimed areas and each corresponding reference azea <br />will be collected in June of2005. Herbaceous production will be determined byhand clipping six 0.1 <br />square meter quadrats along each randomly located point-intercept transect. Plots will be placed to <br />I' the right side ofineter-marks 2, 5, 9, 12, 14, and 22. The vegetation will be clipped and separated by <br />life form. The life form categories include perennial grass, annual grass, perennial forb, undesirable <br />perennial forb, and annual forb. Additionally, alfalfa (Medicago sativa) will be separated for <br />' evaluation of production data. Clipped vegetation will be separated and weighed to the nearest 0.1 <br />gram with the corresponding "wet" weight recorded. The clipped vegetation will be oven dried and <br />re-weighed as a field "dry" weight. The dry weights will be converted to pounds per acre for each <br />sampled area. The six production plots clipped along each transect will be averaged into a production <br />value per transect before they are evaluated for success comparison and statistical evaluation. <br />Productivity on each reclaimed azea will be considered successful if the sample mean is at least 90 <br />' percent of the productivity sample mean measured on each corresponding reference area. Ten <br />transects will initially be evaluated for success comparison and statistical evaluation purposes on <br />each sampling area. The Snedecor-Cochran sample adequacy formula (Equation 2) will be utilized <br />to evaluate whether an adequate number of samples are collected. <br />~ Post Mining Success Demonstration <br />Post-mining demonstration of revegetation success for vegetative cover and herbaceous production <br />within the reclaimed areas will be assessed through use of the One-Sample T-Test (Equation 3). <br />This statistical testis used only when the sample mean for the reclaimed area is less than 90 percent <br />of the mean value for the reference area. <br />(3) <br />t= Q X <br />Ss <br />Where: <br />t~ = Calculated t value <br />Q = 90% of the standard <br />x = Bond release block sample mean <br />sx = Standard error of the mean (s/fin) <br />s = Sample standazd deviation <br />n = Sample size <br />