Reclaimed Areas Mapping by Remotely Sensed Data

In the last decade several mining areas and corresponding dumps are subject to reclamation process in Bulgaria. We focused our research on one of the most important in the copper production for 20 year period for our country – Medet deposit. This mining complex consists of an open cast mine, the overburden dumps and a processing plant. After ceasing its exploitation in 1994 a rehabilitation program for soil cover and hydrographic network was established and launched. A continuous task is the monitoring of these activities from the beginning for at least 15 years period. We consider that revealing the potential of satellite multispectral and multitemporal imagery will provide valuable information on the impact of this long-term mining activity on the environment. One of the first tasks was to prepare thematic maps for several, non-successive years of the affected areas at regional scale. On the next step change detection methods were be used to assist in short-term reclamation plans preparation and planting corresponding vegetation. In this research the data from Landsat TM/ETM+ combined with in-situ measured data was used. For data processing several techniques, both standard, such as basic and advanced statistics, image enhancement and data fusion, and novel methods for supervised classification were used. The results obtained show that used data and the implemented approach are useful in environmental monitoring and economically attractive for the company responsible for the ecological state of the region. * Corresponding author.