Mapping the cumulative impacts of long-term mining disturbance and progressive rehabilitation on ecosystem services

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.137214Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The spatial and temporal changes in ecosystem services on a mine site were mapped.

  • Broadscale mining landscapes changes are driven by disturbance and rehabilitation.

  • Trade-offs and synergies between ecosystem services provision changed over time.

  • This paper provides a way of assessing ecosystems services in the context of mining.

Abstract

Open-cut coal mining can seriously disturb and reshape natural landscapes which results in a range of impacts on local ecosystems and the services they provide. To address the negative impacts of disturbance, progressive rehabilitation is commonly advocated. However, there is little research focusing on how these impacts affect ecosystem services within mine sites and changes over time. The aim of this study was to assess the cumulative impacts of mining disturbance and rehabilitation on ecosystem services through mapping and quantifying changes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Four ecosystem services including carbon sequestration, air quality regulation, soil conservation and water yield were assessed in 1989, 1997, 2005 and 2013. Disturbance and rehabilitation was mapped using LandTrendr algorithm with Landsat. We mapped spatial patterns and pixel values for each ecosystem service with corresponding model and the landscape changes were analyzed with landscape metrics. In addition, we assessed synergies and trade-offs using Spearman's correlation coefficient for different landscape classes and scales. The results showed that carbon sequestration, air quality regulation and water yield services were both positively and negatively affected by vegetation cover changes due to mined land disturbance and rehabilitation, while soil conservation service were mainly influenced by topographic changes. There were strong interactions between carbon sequestration, air quality regulation and water yield, which were steady among different spatial scales and landscape types. Soil conservation correlations were weak and changed substantially due to differences of spatial scales and landscape types. Although there are limitations associated with data accessibility, this study provides a new research method for mapping impacts of mining on ecosystem services, which offer spatially explicit information for decision-makers and environmental regulators to carry out feasible policies, balancing mining development with ecosystem services provision.

Introduction

Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems, which include provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural services (Costanza et al., 1997; MA, 2003). The concept has attracted much attention from researchers and the public, and has been widely applied for both research and natural resources management (Daily and Matson, 2008; Naidoo et al., 2008; Villa et al., 2009; Kienast et al., 2009; Haines-Young and Potschin, 2010; Müller et al., 2010; de Groot et al., 2010). Different types of ecosystem services are assessed through various methods to acquire their biophysical, social and/or economic value (TEEB, 2010; Bryan et al., 2011; de Groot et al., 2012). Among multiple ecosystem services assessment methods, mapping has increased in popularity in recent years (Egoh et al., 2008; Burkhard et al., 2012; Crossman et al., 2013). Mapping could provide spatially explicit information about ecosystem services value and distribution across different scales, which can help decision-makers and stakeholders characterize and manage ecosystem conditions (Egoh et al., 2012; Goldstein et al., 2012; Martínez-Harms and Balvanera, 2012; Burkhard et al., 2013; Turner et al., 2014; Albert et al., 2016; Grêt-Regamey et al., 2017).

Each ecosystem service is not independent, but also may interact with other services, which can be represented by synergies or trade-offs (Bennett et al., 2009; Grêt-Regamey et al., 2013; Crossman et al., 2013). Trade-off is the simultaneous reduction in one ecosystem service and the enhancement of another, while synergy is when two ecosystem services are both enhanced (Haase et al., 2012; Sil et al., 2016). In recent years, the assessment and mapping of synergies and trade-offs have emerged as an important area of ecosystem services research (Jopke et al., 2014; Ament et al., 2017). These methods have been integrated in landscape and urban planning research (Castro et al., 2014) and natural resource management (García-Nieto et al., 2013) in a range of contexts from forests (Duncker et al., 2012), mountains (Langner et al., 2017), agricultural lands (Kragt and Robertson, 2014), water catchments (Feng et al., 2017) and urban green spaces (Dennis and James, 2017). Ecosystem services synergies and trade-offs have been mapped at different spatial and temporal scales, which may also be analyzed as bundles when repeatedly appearing together across space or time (Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010; Pohjanmies et al., 2017; Spake et al., 2017; Xu et al., 2017). Synergies and trade-offs can reveal the dynamic relationship between ecosystem services responding to external drivers such as climatic change (Kirchner et al., 2015) or anthropogenic disturbance such as land use changes (Keller et al., 2015; Langerwisch et al., 2018).

Among the various forms of anthropogenic impacts, open-cut mining is one of the most destructive activities seriously affecting the surface landscape and surrounding environment (Perring et al., 2013; Larondelle and Haase, 2012; Lechner et al., 2017). Open-cut mining leases commonly cover very large areas, which include multiple operational land use types (Lechner et al., 2016), such as spoil and pits, tailings or washery waste, plant infrastructures, and remnant vegetation and rehabilitated vegetation. Open-cut mining activities due to their large-scale area can induce large and irreversible impacts on the local ecosystems and their services through the vegetation removal, soil stripping and topography reshaping. Mine rehabilitation is commonly required after a resource has been exploited and utilizes a range of measures including vegetation reseeding and landform reconstruction (Mudd, 2009). Progressive rehabilitation approaches are applied during the operational phase of mining rather than at closure (Mattiske, 2016). The successful application of progressive rehabilitation is often required by a mining operation to meet local policies and regulations (Lechner et al., 2016).

Both mining disturbance and rehabilitation can cause considerable and permanent changes to land cover and landforms affecting the ecosystem services provided (Doley and Audet, 2013; Perring et al., 2013). The quantification and assessment of the impacts of the disturbance and rehabilitation on ecosystem services is important for decision-makers and when assessing rehabilitation success (Evans, 2000; Mattiske, 2016). Current research on the environmental impacts of mining tend to focus on the physical or chemical attributes of single environmental components such as soil erosion, water runoff (Carroll et al., 2000; Zhang et al., 2015), carbon stock (Akala and Lal, 2000; Sperow, 2006) or air pollution (Ghose, 2002; Alvarado et al., 2015) to list a few. These are commonly measured at the site scale using field data with classic plot based experimental designs (Bao et al., 2012). Most site-based studies do not comprehensively reveal the conditions of the whole mining lease and do not provide a spatially explicit characterization addressing the heterogenous nature of mining landscapes. Studies of mining impacts on ecosystem services are simply conducted according to the requirement of environmental impact assessment and/or estimation of the influence on economic value (Rigina, 2002; Castilla-gómez and Herrera-herbert, 2015; Preece et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2017). To the best of our knowledge there are no studies which have assessed changes in ecosystem services due to long-term disturbance and progressive rehabilitation, however, in many cases mining policies and regulations recognize the importance of ecosystem services.

To provide decision-makers and stakeholders with explicit information about the mining impacts on ecosystem services at the mining lease scale, ecosystem services mapping can be a useful methodology. Although ecosystem services mapping has been widely applied in various regions and contexts across the world, there are only a few examples of studies investigating mining impacts (Larondelle and Haase, 2012; Mandle and Tallis, 2016; Wang et al., 2018a; Wang et al., 2018b). This study selected the Curragh mine site as the research area, which is one of the largest open-cut coal mines in Australia. The aim of this work is to map and assess the cumulative impacts of long-term mined disturbance and progressive rehabilitation on ecosystem services which include carbon sequestration, air quality regulation, water yield and soil conservation. We assessed cumulative impacts through mapping ecosystem services spatial patterns and synergies/trade-offs at different spatial scales and landscape types over time. This study provides a useful approach for studying ecosystem services in the mining context to ensure the balance between minerals provision and ecosystem sustainability.

Section snippets

Study area

The study area is part of the Curragh mine which is one of the largest open-cut coal mine in Australia (Fig. 1). It is located in the Bowen Basin which is the largest coal basin in Australia and a catchment adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Marine Park. The site was chosen as an example of a representative setting of open-cut coal mining. The mine lease area assessed in this study covers a total area of 76.62 km2. Mining activities initially started in 1982 and have continually

Curragh mine disturbance and rehabilitation

Landscape changes from disturbance and rehabilitation were mapped using LandTrendr and the spatial patterns of those changes can be seen in Fig. 2. Over the study period the mine expanded eastward with older areas of mining disturbance progressively being rehabilitated. By 2013 the majority of the mine lease was occupied by rehabilitated land in the west and mining in the east. Landscape metrics for the disturbance and rehabilitation patches are described in Table 1. From 1989 to 2013, both the

Spatial and temporal changes of ecosystem services distribution

Mining is characterized as one of the most intensive sources of environmental and social disruption both temporally and spatially (Hilson, 2002; Doley and Audet, 2013; Lechner et al., 2017). Mining differs from other forms of land uses in that it is dynamic in both space and time resulting in changes, which are very often irreversible, to nearly every component of the earth system from topography, soil to hydrology (Doley and Audet, 2013; Perring et al., 2013). Our study characterized the

Conclusion

This study mapped and quantified the spatial distribution and pairwise interactions of four ecosystem services in different years based on publicly available datasets. The distinctive ecosystem service spatial patterns for different years showed the temporal-scale cumulative mining impacts of long-term mining disturbance and progressive rehabilitation on ecosystem services. The correlation differences among different land cover types and spatial scales demonstrate the land use and spatial-scale

Declaration of competing interest

We declare that we have no actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, our work.

. Description of the model process and input parameters for the four ecosystem services. Four widely used models were applied, while the value of NPP (Net Primary Production), Rpm10, WY (Water Yield) and SC (Soil

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