Reconstructing disturbance history for an intensively mined region by time-series analysis of Landsat imagery

Abstract

Surface mining disturbances have attracted attention globally due to extensive influence on topography, land use, ecosystems, and human populations in mineral-rich regions. We analyzed a time series of Landsat satellite imagery to produce a 28-year disturbance history for surface coal mining in a segment of eastern USA's central Appalachian coalfield, southwestern Virginia. The method was developed and applied as a three-step sequence: vegetation index selection, persistent vegetation identification, and mined-land delineation by year of disturbance. The overall classification accuracy and kappa coefficient were 0.9350 and 0.9252, respectively. Most surface coal mines were identified correctly by location and by time of initial disturbance. More than 8 % of southwestern Virginia's >4000-km(2) coalfield area was disturbed by surface coal mining over the 28-year period. Approximately 19.5 % of the Appalachian coalfield surface within the most intensively mined county (Wise County) has been disturbed by mining. Mining disturbances expanded steadily and progressively over the study period. Information generated can be applied to gain further insight concerning mining influences on ecosystems and other essential environmental features.

Spatial and temporal relationships among watershed mining, water quality, and freshwater mussel status in an eastern USA river

“…Mining disturbance within the Powell River watershed was assessed by accessing data generated by Li et al (2015aLi et al ( , 2015b. These authors analyzed 24 Landsat satellite, each covering~90% of the watershed's coal-bearing areas, to identify surface mined areas by location and by year of most recent disturbance for the 1984-2011 period.…”

“…Mining disturbance maps (Li et al, 2015b) were overlaid on the National Land Cover Data 2011 (MRLC, 2015) to estimate land cover.…”

Assessment of Mining Extent and Expansion in Myanmar Based on Freely-Available Satellite Imagery

“…As a result, the ability to map and monitor mining activity is essential to understanding and managing these potential effects. Many previous remote sensing studies have focused on intensively-mined study areas encompassed by one or two satellite images and dominated by a single type of resource extraction, such as coal, gold, or oil sands [22,[25][26][27][28]44]. A particularly large-scale study evaluated copper mining in part of the USA state of Arizona, a study area spanning nine Landsat scenes [19].…”

“…A particularly large-scale study evaluated copper mining in part of the USA state of Arizona, a study area spanning nine Landsat scenes [19]. Some studies have also incorporated spatially-explicit mine locality information (such as permit data) to facilitate mine identification [15,26,45].…”

“…Although multi-temporal fine-resolution imagery has been used to study mining area change at local or sub-national scales [20,22], remote sensing of surface mining change is frequently based on Landsat imagery [15,17,[23][24][25][26]. Due to the national scale of our study, we developed an automated approach to mining change detection for Myanmar using freely-available Landsat imagery.…”