Using Remote Sensing to Map Vegetation Density on a Reclaimed Surface Mine

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, in a cooperative agreement with the Office of Surface Mining’s Charleston Field Office, is evaluating the utility of high resolution satellite images for characterizing vegetation patterns on reclaimed surface mines. This paper details the results of the first phase of this project, which sought to determine whether satellite images could be used to estimate percentage vegetation cover. Depending on the post-mining land use, percent vegetation cover may be employed as a standard for evaluating re-vegetation success prior to bond release. However, the increasing size of surface operations, combined with labor intensive field techniques required to estimate percent cover, make implementing the standard difficult. This paper details a simple technique for estimating percent vegetation cover based on the widely-used Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). NDVI exhibited a 0.96 correlation with percent vegetation cover for 34 reference samples collected on a 94 acre study area in southern West Virginia. Based on this relationship, a technique was developed that produced a mean error of 6.41% (+/2.68% at the 90% confidence level) when estimating percent cover for the 34 field sites. _______________________________ Paper was presented at the 2008 “Incorporating Geospatial Technologies into SMCRA Business Processes”, March 25 – 27, 2008, Atlanta, GA. Michael Shank is a geographer at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, in Charleston, West Virginia.