A method for monitoring mine tailings revegetation using hyperspectral remote sensing

This paper investigates the use of airborne hyperspectral remote sensing imagery in the 400-nm to 900-nm spectral range for the extraction of information suitable for monitoring mine tailings revegetation. Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI) data were acquired over the Copper Cliff mine tailings impoundment area in the VNIR bands during the summers of 1996 and 1998, and Probe 1 data were collected in the VNIR/SWIR bands during the summer of 1999. Endmember fractions of water, lime, fresh and oxidised tailings, low and high photosynthetic vegetation were obtained using constrained linear spectral unmixing. Vegetation fraction, tailings fraction and texture of the vegetation fraction were used in a K-Mean unsupervised classification, which produced the best results using seven classes (78.13% overall accuracy) and captured the vegetation cover from dense homogenous to low density patched cover.