Evaluation of ecological environment quality in China's mining areas by remote sensing: A review

Mineral exploitation provides essential material and energy resources for socio-economic development, but also affects the surrounding ecological environment of mining areas. Evaluating the ecological environmental quality in mining areas is vital to balance resource development and ecological environmental protection. This study attempts to review existing practices of ecological environmental quality evaluation in mining areas using remote sensing in terms of 1) requirements for ecological environmental quality evaluation in mining areas in relevant national laws, regulations and standards, 2) research progress in ecological environmental quality evaluation in mining areas based on remote sensing, 3) existing research gaps of ecological environmental quality evaluation in mining areas using remote sensing and their implications for future research. We found that existing studies have made progress in indicator acquisition, establishment and improvement of evaluation models, yet are still limited in 1) the acquisition capacity and accuracy of remote sensing indicators, including difficulties in acquiring information about the subsurface environment in mining areas, insufficient temporal and spatial resolution of observations, and low accuracy of models for monitoring remote sensing parameters, 2) the generalization ability of existing evaluation models by remote sensing, including low applicability of indicators in different mining areas, excessively complex model implementation and difficulties in automation. Potential research opportunities include expanding accessible indicators by remote sensing, constructing a framework for integrated data collection on the surface and underground, improving the data quality of remote sensing indicators, constructing a new indicator system for evaluation using remote sensing, and developing cloud computing algorithms.