Using Satellite Imagery to Characterize Locations, Ages and Woody Canopy Cover of Reclaimed Surface Mines in Appalachia, Usa

The Appalachian region of USA hosts diverse forests and abundant high-quality coal reserves. Surface mining methods are often used for coal extraction. Because common reclamation methods in past years have not restored forest vegetation, surface mining has created a diverse land base. Although some mined lands have been placed into managed uses, most have not. Little is known about the extent and nature of the land resource base created by surface coal mining in Appalachia. Here, we report on development of methods for interpreting imagery acquired by the Landsat satellites since the early 1980s to identify surface-mine land disturbances by date of mining, and to estimate current woody canopy on those mined areas. We have conducted these analyses working within a study area in southwestern Virginia‟s coalfield. The mined-area identification algorithm, when applied to an independent dataset, was found to identify mined/non-mined areas correctly with an overall accuracy of 89.1%, with 87.4% of mined areas within the independent dataset were classified correctly as mines. Incorrectly classified mines were often areas with low levels of vegetative cover nested within correctly classified mine areas. Preliminary results show that woody canopy cover on mined and reclaimed areas can be estimated successfully using Landsat (0.80 R 2 ). Future work will further develop these procedures and apply them over a test area. Additional