Remote Sensing of Opencast Mining Land Use and Land Cover for Planning, Rehabilitation and Closure

Dear Colleagues,

Opencast mining is one of the most intensive forms of landscape change mediated by humans. Mining significantly alters both natural and anthropogenic systems and returning this land to desirable or historical states is often prevented due to the irreversible nature of mining activities. Additionally, communities living near or over resources are affected both directly and indirectly by mining operations. Although the income generated by mining can enrich people employed by the operations and supply chain, it can also directly affect traditional livelihoods, require resettlement of whole communities, create pollution and have adverse health consequences.

Disturbances associated with opencast mining, unlike underground mining operations, are predominantly found on the land surface and distinguishing the spatial and temporal changes is a task that is particularly well suited to remote sensing. Consequently, remote sensing is being increasingly used for mapping opencast mining land use and land cover to support planning, rehabilitation and closure. Common applications of remote sensing include the quantification of rehabilitation success using vegetation indices, characterizing mining land uses and land cover change for the assessment of land-use conflicts and mapping soil contamination. While the application of remote sensing in mining has increased in the past two decades, there are multiple challenges associated with the spatial, temporal and spectral characteristics of mining land covers that need to be addressed. Furthermore, there are certain areas where remote sensing has been underutilized, such as for assessing rehabilitation.

There are also multiple challenges associated with operationalizing remote sensing applications in the mining industry. From exploration to mine closure, remote sensing can provide spatially explicit products to inform the planning and monitoring of mining operations. Yet on-the-ground examples of how remote sensing has been integrated into operations are still rare and the literature is dominated by one-off research studies.

The focus of this Special Issue is on applications of remote sensing to opencast mining land use and land cover for planning, rehabilitation/reclamation, and closure. We are specifically interested in applications at a single-mine-site scale rather than regional scale.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the application of remote sensing for the following:

• Rehabilitation, restoration and revegetation of post-mining landscapes
• Historical assessment of mining land use and land cover using time-series analysis
• Socio-environmental assessments using land use and land cover mapping
• Assessment of degraded mining landscapes, including historical or abandoned mines
• Real world applied case studies where remote sensing has been used by the mining companies and/or government organizations
• Stability and resilience of post-mining landforms
• Mine closure and the success of post-mining landscapes

We are also interested in novel approaches to:

• Acquiring remote sensing data using UAVs/drones and SAR
• Machine learning and deep learning approaches
• Integrating remote sensing data with GIS analysis

Assoc. Prof. Alex Lechner
Assoc. Prof. Peter Erskine
Mr. Phillip McKenna
Guest Editors

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