Abstract
Rare-earth mining has caused extensive damage to soil, vegetation, and water, significantly threatening ecosystems. Monitoring environmental disturbance caused by rare-earth mining is necessary to protect the ecological environment. A spatiotemporal remote sensing monitoring method for mining to reclamation processes in a rare-earth mining area using multisource time-series satellite images is described. In this study, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is used to evaluate the mining impact. Regression analysis is conducted to relate the HJ-1B CCD and Landsat 5/8 data to reduce the NDVI error related to sensor differences between different datasets. The analysis method of NDVI trajectory data of ground objects is proposed, and areas of environmental disturbance caused by rare-earth mining are identified. Pixel-based trajectories were used to reconstruct the temporal evolution of vegetation, and a temporal trajectory segmentation method is established based on the vegetation changes in different disturbance stages. The temporal trajectory of the rare-earth disturbance points is segmented to extract features in each stage to obtain the disturbance year, recovery year, and recovery cycle and evaluate the vegetation recovery after rare-earth mining disturbance. We applied the method to a stack of 20 multitemporal images from 2000 to 2019 to analyze vegetation disturbance due to rare-earth mining and vegetation recovery in the upper reaches of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, China. The results show the following. (1) Mining industry in the study area experienced rapid expansion before 2008, but growth slowed since the policies implemented by the government since 2009 to restrict rare-earth mining. (2) The continuous influence to the land caused by rare-earth mining can last for decades; however, the reclamation activities shorten the recovery cycle of mining land from 5 to 3 years.
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Acknowledgements
Landsat images were freely obtained from the geospatial data cloud platform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. HJ-1B CCD images were freely obtained from the China Resource Satellite Center. We are grateful for the PIESAT for its technical support.
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The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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This research was funded by Jiangxi Education Department (No. JC20119); Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project Planning Fund (18YJAZH040); Jiangxi Natural Science Foundation(20181BAB206018); and Prosperity of Philosophy and Social Science Research in 2019 (FZ19-YB-05). The Funder is Hengkai Li.
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Zhenbang Wu and Hengkai Li conceived and designed the experiments; Zhenbang Wu performed the experiments; Zhenbang Wu and Yuqing Wang analyzed the data; Zhenbang Wu wrote the paper.
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Wu, ., Li, H. & Wang, Y. Mapping annual land disturbance and reclamation in rare-earth mining disturbance region using temporal trajectory segmentation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 69112–69128 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-15480-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-15480-3