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Underground mining activity has existed for more than 100 years in Nansi lake. Coal mining not only plays a supporting role in local social and economic development but also has a significant impact on the ecological environment in the region. Landsat series remote sensing data (1988~2019) are used to research the impact of coal mining on the ecological environment in Nansi lake. Then support vector machine (SVM) classifier is applied to extract the water area of the upstream lake from 1988 to 2019, and ecological environment and spatiotemporal variation characteristics are analyzed by Remote Sensing Ecology Index (RSEI). The results illustrate that the water area change is associated with annual precipitation. In terms of ecological quality, the area of poor ecological quality areas increased by 101.782 km2, while the area of good and excellent quality areas decreased by 218.988 km2 from 2009 to 2019. So compared with 2009, the ecological quality of the lake is worse in 2019, and then the reason for this change is due to large-scale underground mining. Therefore, the coal mines from the natural reserve may be closed or limited to the mining boundary for protecting the lake's ecological environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abundant coal resources also exist under rivers and oceans besides lands. Underwater mining has a history of more than 100 years. For a long time, all the technological measures in the mining process are to protect the mine itself, and mining engineers seldom consider the non-pollution damage to the ecological environment caused by mining subsidence. Thus, mining under a medium-sized reservoir is selected as a case study in this paper, the damage hazard of underground mining on a reservoir's ecological environment is researched based on reservoir area variations from Landsat remote sensing and subsidence basin volume calculations. The results illustrate the subsidence basins by large-scale mining under a reservoir can alter the original topography of the reservoir bottom, which will form new stagnant water basins, and also a large water area will be dried up. The non-pollution damage is difficult to be recovered and even irreversible, especially for small- and medium-sized reservoirs. The subsidence basin volume was 3.04 × 107 m3 until 2018, which was more than the original reservoir capacity. Most of the water would flow into the subsidence basin and cause the reservoir water to dry up. The essence of non-pollution damage hazard is bottom subsidence caused by underwater mining. Therefore, governments should limit mining activities or close the coal mines for protecting the ecological environment of the reservoir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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