Delayed Gratification the Value of Restoration

During 1996, I was confronted by a vast and derelict 650ha open-cast mine (that had been closed for a few years) – now known as the West Coast Fossil Park (WCFP). The last thing that came to mind was the possibility that 25 years later, I would still have a continued relationship with this project and that it would be declared a National Heritage Site in 2014, and become a centre of excellence in palaeontology. We also proudly earned the 2002 SALI Award of Excellence for our work completed at this site.

At the beginning, all we had to work with was a conceptual rehabilitation plan, a three-month proof of concept contract, and no idea to how to actually do a job of this magnitude in an area where the rainfall averages only 270mm per year. The summer temperatures reach low 40s, and the howling south-easterly wind does not provide respite, and many other challenges of a different nature.

The reason for me being selected for this adventure at the time, was because I have always been rather gung-ho, like challenges and had experience in rehabilitation of railway lines, mountain passes and dunes.

The mine pre-dates concurrent rehabilitation, which has become norm and was in fact a very random mess of overburden dumps and massive excavations, with no topsoil in sight.

In the early winter of 1996, I workshopped some ideas based on lessons I had learned in the previous decade while working on the railways and with the conultants, CES. The result was a rather extensive battery of trails to test some methodologies in the different soils of the old mine ranging from beach sand like tailings dams to calcrete.

The 26 replicated trails informed the way forward and the interpretation and insights gained later formed the basis for the approaches used in other open cast mines in the Western and Northern Cape.

The principal of seed-based restoration was used and augmented by establishing clusters of propagated plants to accelerate the natural vegetation cycle. In the days pre-dating the SANBI flowering plant field guides, horticultural know-how and intuition aided the choice for propagation specific plants by either cuttings or seeds. None of the commercial nurseries were interested in contract growing the plants at the time as they were unknown to the industry and most were considered difficult or impossible to grow.

The upshot of this was that we had to invest in training our people in plant propagation. Using a cheap, low tech nursery, we experimented with local soil media (the soil on the project site is very alkaline, between pH 8.4 to pH 9.2) and a variety of structures such as heated beds. The growing season on the West Coast is very short, with early rains starting in May and ending early September in a good year. In a bad year, the rainfall could start as late as July and only provide 75mm of rainfall before ending in August.

The investment in people paid off, and some of the staff that joined our team as general workers as far back as 1996 are now managers, and shareholders in the Vula Shareholders Trust. Key knowledge gained is being transferred to the next generation to ensure the perpetuation of the intellectual property and ensure that the institutional knowledge is retained and built on for future projects.

Research findings and experience gained while transforming the Chemfos mine to the West Coast Fossil Park over a 10-year period, formed the base for my MSc studies. Monitoring the original trails for a 13-year period, provided me with a unique opportunity and unlocked insights not normally observed in short term studies. This valuable data was further used in developing several other rehabilitation and restoration strategies for other mine and conservation offset sites in lieu of development sites, primarily in the Fynbos, Namaqualand, and Karoo regions.

Since the mine site was largely transformed, finding suitable species from the surrounding area that would tolerate the post mining environment, lead to the discovery of new populations of several species of conservation concern – most notably, the previously unrecorded natural hybrid of Limonium peregrinum x capense. This hybrid as well as one of the West Coast endemic parents, the L capense, is under threat due to habitat destruction caused by industrial development – i.e., Saldanha Bay Industrial Development Zone and rampant urbanisation. The WCFP offers conservation status protection for a number of these plants, including: Limonium capense and Limonium peregrinum.

In finding ways to increase the germination rates of particularly long-lived species of the local plant seeds, “smoke water” was used. The use of this was pioneered by Brown (SANBI) and Boucher (US) but was a logistical nightmare on the scale of hundreds of hectares. Experimentation led to the development of a novel new product, later called FireGrow; this is an extremely concentrated smoke formulation that stimulates not only seed of fire climax vegetation but a very wide range of plant seeds.

This innovation made it very cost effective to use the seed primer on all sites that use seedbased techniques.

The Fossil Park is now home to one of the biggest collections of Miocene fossils collections in the world. Here, the focus is on education and training as well as tourism, providing insights into the world at the very early stages of the development of fynbos in the region. The influence of climate change is insightful and it is hard to believe that the now arid West Coast was once a tropical environment. In the Fossil Park Amphitheatre, plants resembling the Miocene era were planted and reflect in stark contrast with the modern-day vegetation of Saldanha Flats Strandveld, and Saldanha Limestone Strandveld.

Researchers, students and tourists are afforded a rare opportunity not only to explore the unique fossil find but also the surrounding 650ha of conservation area that was once a dusty opencast mine.

The process of restoration is ongoing and the battle against invasive species such as Acacia cyclops is relentless and provides sobering insights in how careless we are in our dealings with our planet earth. Fortunately, we do learn and the future is secure in the knowledge gained and lessons learned at this fascinating place Vula Environmental Services has called home for the past 25 years.

By Deon van Eeden, MD of Vula Environmental Services