Airborne and spaceborne remote sensing of environmental impacts of lignite mining activities in central Germany

Mining activities in the former GDR have caused profound and irreversible changes of the environment. The consequence of this exploitation has been a completely new system, “mining successive landscapes”. Today there is an incredibly high demand for information on environmental changes for long term monitoring of these “mining successive landscapes”. Because of the size of the areas and the dynamics of the ongoing processes it is necessary to develop new low cost techniques for the assessment, observation and supervising of the occurring processes. Multitemporal and multisensoral remote sensing data offer the best possibilities to fulfil these demands. For the characterisation of the region it is necessary to use different scales. The whole region can be observed with satellite data. More detailed investigations with high ecological relevance can be fulfilled by means of airborne remote sensing. The comparison of the potential of various airborne sensors presented in this paper was carried out in the former mining area of Goitsche near Bitterfeld