Spatio-temporal Characteristics of Vegetation Coverage in the Open-pit Mine Waste Dump of Baorixile Based on Landsat Images

Coal plays an irreplaceable role in China's energy structure. With the development of social economy, China's demand for coal resources is increasing, and the conflict between coal mining and ecological protection is becoming increasingly prominent. Therefore, it is of great significance for making scientific decisions about mine ecological environment to carry out effective monitoring. Based on the Landsat image from 2000 to 2021, this paper extracts the boundary range of the dump year by year at the Open-pit Mine Waste Dump of Baorixile in Hulun buir City. The dimidiate pixel model is used to quantitatively invert the fractional vegetation coverage and analyzes the spatio-temporal variation characteristics of the vegetation coverage in dumps from both spatial and temporal perspectives. The results show that the mining activities of the Baorixile open-pit mine have brought serious disturbances to the vegetation. Since the beginning of ecological restoration around 2012, the high and extremely high vegetation coverage areas of the dump have increased by about 32.72 km². In the early stage of the restoration, the dumping sites have been degraded to a certain extent, but they have improved quickly, and the overall vegetation has shown a trend of improvement, whose effect is obvious. By monitoring the dynamic change of vegetation coverage and analyzing its spatial-temporal variation characteristics, this paper provides important monitoring data for scientific decision-making of the ecological restoration via monitoring the dynamic of vegetation coverage and analyzing its spacio-temporal characteristics.