Surface coal mining impacts on land use change and ecological service value: a case study in Shengli coalfield, Inner Mongolia

Abstract

Coal plays a crucial role in global economic development and remains the most common and widely distributed fossil fuel worldwide. As the world's largest developing country, China's mining and utilization of coal resources have contributed significantly to the country’s rapid economic growth. Inner Mongolia is an ecologically fragile arid and semi-arid area of China. The exploitation of opencast mining has seriously hindered the sustainable use of regional land and the residents' well-being. Using ENVI-based remote sensing images from 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020, this study employed a random forest algorithm to divide land utilization types into construction land, vegetation, cultivated land, bare land, and water areas and analyzed the characteristics of land use and ecosystem service value changes over the past 20 years. The results were as follows: (1) Construction land in the mining area changed minimally from 2000 to 2020; vegetation and water bodies showed a decreasing trend, whereas bare and cultivated lands showed an increasing trend. Bare land exhibited the largest change in area proportion and water bodies the smallest. (2) The total ecosystem service value of the mining area declined from 10.939 to 9.527 billion Yuan. Vegetation ecosystem service value was the highest, followed by cultivated land and water, with the bare land ecosystem service value the lowest. (3) On a spatial scale, the total ecosystem service value of the Shengli mining area decreased year by year, indicating that land use changes in the mining area do have an impact on ecosystem service value.