Assessment of Ecological Environment Quality in Rare Earth Mining Areas Based on Improved RSEI

Weilong Yang, Yi Zhou () and Chaozhu Li
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Weilong Yang: School of Environmental Studies, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
Yi Zhou: Command Center of Natural Resources Comprehensive Survey, China Geological Survey, Beijing 100055, China
Chaozhu Li: Command Center of Natural Resources Comprehensive Survey, China Geological Survey, Beijing 100055, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: In past decades, the reckless exploitation of rare earth mines devastated the ecological environment. Under strict regulation and governance, the exploitation has gradually gotten back on track in recent years. In this regard, timely and accurate assessment of the ecological environment quality of rare earth management areas is indispensable for regional mine development planning, ecological protection, and sustainable development. Being relatively objective and providing instant results, the Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) is widely used in evaluating ecological environment quality. This paper combined Landsat 8 OLI multispectral imagery with meteorological, land type, and other data to set the Net Primary Productivity (NPP). The NPP reflects detailed regional vegetation destruction and climate variation, the greenness index of RSEI. We also used kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) to obtain the improved ecological index K-RSEI NPP while evaluating the ecological environment quality of rare earth mining areas in southern Jiangxi and compared this with the traditional RSEI results. The results indicate that: (1) PC1 accounts for 88.51% of the results obtained based on K-RSEI NPP , and the average correlation coefficient with each index reaches 0.757, which integrates the characteristics of the four indicators; (2) Compared with other indexes, the K-RSEI NPP proposed in this paper can better display the detailed information of the ecological environment in the rare earth mining areas to differentiate mining areas under various statuses and cities with different vegetation coverage, and its results were consistent with the actual verification. Therefore, our K-RSEI NPP can provide an effective basis for monitoring and evaluating the ecological environment of the mining area.

Keywords: remote sensing; rare earth minerals; ecological environment quality; Net Primary Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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