Abstract
The large-scale development and utilization of coal resources have brought great challenges to the ecological environment of coal-mining areas. Therefore, this paper has used scientific and effective methods to monitor and evaluate whether changes in ecological environment quality in coal-mining areas are helpful to alleviate the contradiction between human and nature and realize the sustainable development of such coal-mining areas. Firstly, in order to quantify the degree of coal dust pollution in coal-mining areas, an index-based coal dust index (ICDI) is proposed. Secondly, based on the pressure-state-response (PSR) framework, a new coal-mine ecological index (CMEI) was established by using the principal component analysis (PCA) method. Finally, the coal-mine ecological index (CMEI) was used to evaluate and detect the temporal and spatial changes of the ecological environment quality of the Ningwu Coalfield from 1987 to 2021. The research shows that ICDI has a strong ability to extract coal dust with an overall accuracy of over 96% and a Kappa coefficient of over 0.9. As a normalized difference index, ICDI can better quantify the pollution degree of coal dust. The effectiveness of CMEI was evaluated by four methods: sample image-based, classification-based, correlation-based, and distance-based. From 1987 to 2021, the ecological environment quality of Ningwu Coalfield was improved, and the mean of CMEI increased by 0.1189. The percentages of improvement and degradation of ecological environment quality were 71.85% and 27.01%, respectively. The areas with obvious degradation were mainly concentrated in coal-mining areas and built-up areas. The ecological environment quality of Pingshuo Coal Mine, Shuonan Coal Mine, Xuangang Coal Mine, and Lanxian Coal Mine also showed improvement. The results of Moran’s Index show that CMEI has a strong positive spatial correlation, and its spatial distribution is clustered rather than random. Coal-mining areas and built-up areas showed low–low clustering (LL), while other areas showed high–high clustering (HH). The utilization and popularization of CMEI provides an important reference for decision makers to formulate ecological protection policies and implement regional coordinated development strategies.
Highlights
Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economic construction has achieved remarkable achievements, which benefited from China’s long-term development and utilization of coal resources
Continue to examine the weights of the ecological environment indicators (Table S1), and found that only the symbols of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), vegetative health index (VHI), wetness component (Wet) and NDBSI, index-based coal dust index (ICDI), land-surface temperature (LST) in PC1 are opposite, indicating that the contributions of the two groups of indexes to the ecological environment are opposite, which is in line with objective facts
As ICDI is a normalized difference index, its function is not limited to extracting coal dust information and calculating the coal dust area, but can be used to quantify the pollution degree of coal dust, which is of great significance to further study the ecological environment quality of coal-mining areas
Summary
Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economic construction has achieved remarkable achievements, which benefited from China’s long-term development and utilization of coal resources. 40 years, China has produced more than 80 billion tons of raw coal Such large-scale and ultra-intensive coal-mining activities are bound to have a great impact on the ecological environment of the coal-mining areas. It is mainly manifested as surface subsidence [4], destruction of landscape pattern [5,6], decline of soil quality [7], degradation of ecosystem structure and function [8,9], spontaneous combustion of coal and coal gangue [10,11], and water and air pollution [12,13]. Scientifically and rationally evaluating the ecological environment quality in coal-mining areas and grasping the law of its evolution in time is essential for quantifying the impact of coal-mining activities and promoting regional sustainable development
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