Limited biomass recovery from gold mining in Amazonian forests

Gold mining has rapidly increased across the Amazon Basin in recent years, especially in the Guiana shield, where it is responsible for >90% of total deforestation. However, the ability of forests to recover from gold mining activities remains largely unquantified. 
Forest inventory plots were installed on recently abandoned mines in two major mining regions in Guyana, and re-censused 18 months later, to provide the first ground-based quantification of gold mining impacts on Amazon forest biomass recovery. 
We found that woody biomass recovery rates on abandoned mining pits and tailing ponds are amongst the lowest ever recorded for tropical forests, with close to no woody biomass recovery after 3-4 years. 
On the overburden sites (i.e. areas not mined but where excavated soil is deposited), however, aboveground biomass recovery rates (0.4 - 3.5 Mg ha-1 yr-1) were within the range of those recorded in other secondary forests across the Neotropics following abandonment of past...