Geomining Site Ecological Assessment and Reclamation Along Coastal Line of the Kerch Peninsula

Abstract

Kerch district bounded by the sea in the east and by mines in the west was developed along the shore line of the Black Sea due to the free areas located inside city boundary. The territory of the Kerch Peninsula is characterized by open pits, dumps and sludge storages left after opencast mining of iron ores. The assessment of land cover condition on the study area was carried out in the course of time and area. The results of vegetation cover assessment were used to evaluate the changes in normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from 1992 to 2010. It was fixed various density of vegetation cover for the same site after two decades of natural restoration. To make research on reclaimed lands fertility more detailed we studied the influence of different thickness of covering layer of soil mass and mining rocks bottom (or their technical mixtures) on the agricultural crops productivity with various adaptive potential. Artificial profiles of creating reclaimed lands to retrieve abandoned ore-mining territories for agricultural use have been proposed. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013.