Monitoring land degradation and reclamation change from ATB open-pit coal mine during 1976–2009

This paper reports an investigation into the use and application of remote sensing data for monitoring the environmental impacts of open cast coal mining in ATB. This investigation is based on the digital analysis of Landsat and HJ-1 images acquired from 1976 to 2009. The characteristics of the imagery enable quantitative analysis of different open cast mine features, such as open-pits, change of land use, reclamation processes and estimation of vegetation cover in the affected areas. The interactively interpret method was used to derive land use map during 1976-2009. The result shows that between 1976 and 2009, 64.05% of cultivate land, 17.35% of vegetation, and 16.89% of bare soil were transformed into coalfield, in the study area. A lot of land was destroyed and the total area is up to 5224.98 hm
²
. Land reclamation began in 1992 and the reclamation area is 1167.72 hm
²
which only account for 28.78% of total degraded land areas in 2009,and the rate of reclamation is less than that that of degradation. Maps produced from remote sensing data can provide information for subsequent impact assessments from surface mining development on land cover, as well as forming the basis for reclamation planning and monitoring.