Surface Disturbance Analysis in Rare Earth Mining

Abstract

Mining ion-type rare-earth ore made the landscape and ecological environment degraded in mining area, and the tailing produced by rare-earth mining also led large areas land desertification, which resulted in surface temperature variations and significant differences in other types of mining disturbances. In order to analyse surface disturbance of rare-earth mining area, this paper applied the methods based on Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Temperature different Coefficient (TDC) as the ecological disturbance indicator, compared and validated their applicability in Lingbei rare-earth mining area of Southern China. The results illustrated that, compared to NDVI, the TDC which reflected the characteristic of rare-earth mining technology has better discrimination of disturbance, especially for in-situ leach mining area. The places of tailing and the in-situ leach mining plants were the most dramatic mining disturbance. They had the biggest TDC value, followed by orchards and farmlands, reclamation plants, they had relatively small disturbance. And the last was the plant with the smallest TDC value. TDC in rare-earth mining could better correspond to the level of surface ecological disturbance. Therefore, TDC as the indicator of ecological disturbance factor had better performance than NDVI in rare-earth mining area.