Remote sensing empowering ecological restoration in mining areas: Current status, challenges, and prospects

Remote sensing technology provides crucial technical support for ecological restoration in mining areas. This paper, based on the entire lifecycle of ecological restoration in mining areas, summarizes the research status, challenges and prospects of remote sensing-enabled ecological restoration in these areas. The findings indicate that: ① Remote sensing-enabled ecological restoration in mining areas mainly includes five parts: basic investigation, environmental monitoring, problem diagnosis, planning and design, and effectiveness evaluation. ② Its technical level has gradually developed from the early stage, which focused on feature identification, range extraction, and single-element monitoring, to a rapid development stage characterized by multi-source fusion, intelligent interpretation, quantitative inversion, process characterization, and comprehensive diagnosis and evaluation. ③ The current common challenges include the limited timeliness of remote sensing image acquisition in mining areas, insufficient spatiotemporal resolution, insufficient accuracy of information extraction, and a lack of knowledge miningcapability. ④ In the future, there is an urgent need to enhance the real-time acquisition capability of remote sensing images through integrated sky-ground data fusion, improve the spatiotemporal resolution of remote sensing through multimodal data fusion, enhance the accuracy of remote sensing information processing through the fusion of deep learning and mechanistic models, and improve the knowledge mining capability through deepening multidisciplinary integration. In the future, efforts should be guided by the actual needs of ecological restoration in mining areas, strengthening industry-university-research collaborative innovation, promoting the deep integration of remote sensing and restoration engineering, so that remote sensing technology can better serve the ecological protection, and management of mine areas.