Monitoring Quarry Area with Landsat Long Time-Series for Socioeconomic Study

Haoteng Zhao,Jin Yang,Jianbo Liu,Fu Chen,Yong Ma,Wutao Yao,Liyuan Jiang

doi:10.3390/rs10040517

Abstract

Quarry sites result from human activity, which includes the removal of original vegetation and the overlying soil to dig out stones for building use. Therefore, the dynamics of the quarry area provide a unique view of human mining activities. Actually, the topographic changes caused by mining activities are also a result of the development of the local economy. Thus, monitoring the quarry area can provide information about the policies of the economy and environmental protection. In this paper, we developed a combined method of machine learning classification and quarry region analysis to estimate the quarry area in a quarry region near Beijing. A temporal smoothing based on the classification results of all years was applied in post-processing to remove outliers and obtain gently changing sequences along the monitoring term. The method was applied to Landsat images to derive a quarry distribution map and quarry area time series from 1984 to 2017, revealing significant inter-annual variability. The time series revealed a five-stage development of the quarry area with different growth patterns. As the study region lies on two jurisdictions—Tianjin and Hebei—a comparison of the quarry area changes in the two jurisdictions was applied, which revealed that the different policies in the two regions could impose different impacts on the development of a quarry area. An analysis concerning the relationship between quarry area and gross regional product (GRP) was performed to explore the potential application on socioeconomic studies, and we found a strong positive correlation between quarry area and GRP in Langfang City, Hebei Province. These results demonstrate the potential benefit of annual monitoring over the long-term for socioeconomic studies, which can be used for mining decision making.

Highlights

After the 1980s in China, especially in Beijing, there was a rapid expansion in economic growth with cities and urban areas consuming a huge amount of building materials
Quarries contribute a great part to local government revenue, which pushes the industry of building material to a leading position in Hebei‘s economy
With the intervention from local government, the direction and magnitude of its dynamics may change dramatically due to changes in economic policy and environmental initiatives

Summary

Introduction

After the 1980s in China, especially in Beijing, there was a rapid expansion in economic growth with cities and urban areas consuming a huge amount of building materials. Quarries in Langfang City of Hebei Province went through an enormous expansion because of the great development of the major cities around this region. Metropolises such as Beijing and Tianjin experienced a wide upsurge in building construction and the materials of these buildings came mainly from the nearby quarries considering the transportation fees. Monitoring quarry-rich regions at multi-temporal and high spatial resolution is important for local governments to gain information that is needed for the policies of economic and environmental protection

Objectives

Methods

Results