A recently published paper, studying the current updates in global mining land use is now available in the Scientific Data Journal. The study has been conducted by a team of leading international experts, amongst whom is EuropaBON’s member Ian McCallum (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis,IIASA).
The growing demand for minerals has pushed mining activities into new areas increasingly affecting biodiversity-rich natural biomes. Mapping the land use of the global mining sector is, therefore, a prerequisite for quantifying, understanding and mitigating adverse impacts caused by mineral extraction.
Global overview of additional mining area mapped in Version 2 compared to Version 1, aggregated to 5050 km grid cells and projected to Interrupted Goode Homolosine.
Against this background, the paper updates previous data from mapping mining sites worldwide. Utilising visual interpretation of Sentinel-2 images for 2019, we inspected more than 34,000 mining locations across the globe. The result is a global-scale dataset containing 44,929 polygon features covering 101,583 km2 of large-scale as well as artisanal and small-scale mining.
Read the full paper here.
