Mine Site Design, Rehabilitation and Closure for Resilient Landforms

Dear Colleagues,

Globally, thousands of active and legacy mining sites require addressing, giving rise to challenges related to environmental stability, water management, and community wellbeing, with site layout design for sustainability, progressive rehabilitation, and effective closure approaches now widely accepted as essential for long-term land stability and safety and risk management (including hazards such as flooding, erosion and water quality). Risk-based design, progressive rehabilitation, and ecological restoration can form the basis for developing an integrated framework that can address both technical and socio-economic dimensions. And now, climate change further increases uncertainties in hydrology, landform evolution, and ecological resilience, adding to existing complexities and spurring the need for increasingly adaptive approaches.

By bringing together interdisciplinary research, this Special Issue seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the sustainable design, rehabilitation and closure of mining sites, and to provide innovative insights into how landscapes can be designed, managed, and monitored for long-term stability and safety.

The goal of this Special Issue is to gather together papers (original research articles and review papers) that provide insights into designing mining sites for resilience, progressive rehabilitation, and closure as part of risk-based concepts.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

• Mining site layout and operational design and planning for stability and resilience.
• Progressive rehabilitation approaches and integration of closure into operational phases.
• Flooding and hydrological management, water balance, and long-term water management.
• Erosional and structural stability and erosion of post-mining landforms and consequences for soil development, water quality, vegetation recovery, and long-term land use.
• Tailings storage facilities (TSFs)—design and transformation of tailings landscapes (covers, revegetation, and land–water interactions) towards safe and stable post-mining land uses and stewardship.
• Cover system design for resilient post-mining landscapes.
• Soil erosion processes and erosion control measures.
• Landform design for long-term stability and post-mining land use.
• Landform evolution and modelling, the evolution of rehabilitated terrains, and their implications for long-term land use suitability and restoration.
• Void management and strategies for closure of pit lakes and residual voids.
• Water quality and geochemical risks, including acid and metalliferous drainage.
• Decision support under uncertainty for post-mining land transitions—probabilistic scenarios and trade-offs across the water–soil–energy–biodiversity nexus.
• Residual risk governance and stewardship of reclaimed lands, including tenure, responsibilities and financing mechanisms.
• Climate change impacts on design, soil erosion, land rehabilitation and landform resilience.
• Ecological restoration, biodiversity, and soil reconstruction strategies.
• Governance and policy for post-mining land transitions—planning instruments and community outcomes.
• Observation and monitoring of reclaimed landscapes (remote sensing/UAV/in situ) and data-/ML-driven assessment and decision-making.

Dr. Afshin Ghahramani
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• mine site design
• progressive rehabilitation
• flooding
• tailings storage facilities
• soil erosion
• landform evolution
• water quality
• climate change
• innovative technologies in rehabilitation
• reliability engineering
• risk management