Monitoring and Analysis of the Driving Forces of Changes in the Ecological Environment of a Mining Area of Western China from 1986 to 2022

The remote sensing ecological index (RSEI) has been widely used in the rapid monitoring and evaluation of the regional ecological environment; however, the research on the main factors that cause changes in RSEI and the impact of human activities in the mining area on RSEI is not often explored. To this end, this paper selected the Landsat (TM/OLI) series of remote sensing images from 1986 to 2022; extracted the four important indicators of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), the wetness component of the tasseled cap transformation (WET), normalized difference built-up and soil index (NDBSI), and land surface temperature (LST); calculated the remote sensing ecological index (RSEI) based on the principal component analysis method; monitored and evaluated the ecological environment changes in the Shendong Mining Area for a period of 36 years; and analyzed the driving forces that cause these ecological environment changes. The results show the following: (1) The ecological status of the study area has shown an overall upward trend during the 1986-2022 period. (2) From 1986 to 2022, the area of RSEI with a grade of 0.4-0.6 increased by 1142.74 km(2), that with a grade of 0.6-0.8 increased by 124.09 km(2), and that with a grade of 0.8-1.0 increased by 0.73 km(2). (3) In the past 36 years, the proportion of RSEI with a positive grade difference was 97.52%, and the proportion of regions with a negative grade difference was 6.20%. (4) Rainfall is the main factor that causes changes in the regional ecological environment. By analyzing the main driving factors of ecological environment change and the relationship between human activities and RSEI, reference can be provided for the formulation of environmental protection policies and environmental planning in mining areas.