The monitoring of rare earths mining from the Gannan area of Southern China using remote sensing technology

Abstract

The weathering crust Elution-deposited Rare Earth is the peculiar and valuable source in China. The greatly mining activities in the south of GanZhou(Gannan) were occurred disorderly and illegally using the traditional extraction way, which brought out the dreadful environmental influence. In this study, the SPOT5 multi-spectral data was used to recognize and classify the destroyed land from mining activity. It was found that the most mining areas were located dispersedly, covered the area of 60.97km2 in total with 524 sites, which accounted for 3.03% of the whole study area. There were 513 patches of destroyed area less than 1 km2 distributed in the southwest of the study area. The results indicated that the mining integration should be concerned in this region and mining plan for further environmental protection.