Mapping Socio-Environmental Changes in Mining Sites using Landsat Time Series

Michelle Ang

The Mining, Resettlement and Livelihoods: Research and Practice Consortium (MiningResettlement.org) is an initiative of The University of Queensland's Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining (CSRM). It is a multi-party, industry-university research collaboration on mining and resettlement in order to build knowledge for practical application. The Leclab is contributing through developing methods for mapping of mining socio-environmental footprints. The GIS analysis was conducted by Dr Alex Lechner and Michelle Ang Li Ern with assistance of various researchers and on the ground experts.

Study Areas. a) Porgera (Papua New Guinea). b) Sepon (Laos)

So far we have developed time-series analysis for mining sites in Sepon, Laos and Porgera, Papua New Guinea. The first phase of this three-part project is to categorize the types of landuse and infrastructure within the mine footprint using aerial imagery (LANDSAT) and remote sensing techniques to develop ratios of ‘productive elements’ to ‘waste elements’. To achieve this, the landuse classification was done using the manual digitizing method via the ArcGIS software combined with analysis outputs from the CLASlite software. This project is still ongoing, and phase one is soon to be completed. The classification and timeseries animation of the landuse change from before the mining activities started until 2017 have successfully been completed for both sites. Currently, the quantitative analysis of the landuse and infrastructure types and the accuracy assessment of the classified imagery are being carried out.

Subset of time series data representing changes mining land uses (aggregated) non-mining land uses.

To check out the outputs from this research, click here.