With the objective of analyzing the fertility of soils built over open pit coal mining areas (28º35'50'' S e 49º25'26'' W) in the city of Siderópolis (SC), two areas of different reclamation ages were selected: area IV and area VI, reclaimed in 2002 and 2003, respectively. A 100m transection was established in the center of each area, where perpendicular 20m transects were tossed at regular intervals of 10m, alternating to the right and to the left, and nine soil samples were collected (0 - 0,2 m). The nine samples of each group of two consecutive transects were gathered into a compound sample, reducing the sampling universe from 90 to 5 samples of soil for each area. The contents of clay, pH, Phosphorus, Potassium, organic matter, Aluminum, Calcium, Manganese, H + Al, base sum, CTC and base saturation were analyzed. In both areas, the content of clay fell into class three category, the content of organic compound was low, the pH and V% significantly low. Manganese varied from medium to high, BS varied from low to medium and CTC was considered high. In area IV, the content of P was low and Ca varied from medium to low, while in area VI the content of P varied from low to medium and Ca was low. Although differences had been observed among some of the parameters analyzed, they were not severely affected by the reclaimed time of the two areas.
Coal; degraded areas; environmental reclamation
