Mapping Extent and Change in Surface Mines Within the United States for 2001 and 2006

Researchers with the USGS Western Geographic Science Center and Eros Data Center have developed a semi-automated procedure to map the country's mining footprint and establish a baseline to monitor changes in mine extent over time. The process includes a tool that uses seed points sourced from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS), and USGS National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) and recodes patches of barren land that meet a 'distance to seed' requirement and patch size requirement before recoding the value to mining. Our team seeded 2001 NLCD barren pixels with EIA coal points, a clean MRDS point file, and 1992 NLCD mine points in three separate efforts using different distance and patch size parameters for each. Products were merged to create a 2001 mine map of moderate-to-large size mines in the United States, which were subsequently edited to reduce omission and commission errors. This process was replicated using NLCD 2006 barren pixels as a base layer to test how the mining footprint has changed over time, specifically focusing on areas with surface mine expansion. While tool parameters and input data limit our ability to create a comprehensive record of mines for the United States, these methods exhibit merit as a timely approach to generate wall-to-wall, spatially explicit layers representing the recent extent of a wide range of surface mining activities across the country. These raster digital data accompany a journal article describing the full scope of research. 2001 and 2006 data are available in the ERDAS Imagine (.img) format.