Analysis of land use land cover changes for an abandoned mine site

The aim of this study is to the evaluate land use and the land cover changes of an abandoned coal mine in Central Anatolia. The mining activity in the region was started at 1987 and after working for 18 years, all the rights of the mine was passed to an another company which after a while the came up with no coal production since its concession was cancelled on February 2008. Unfortunately, during the life of the mine, there were no mine closure and reclamation activities on the field. There was only a limited afforestation work on the dump site performed by provincial special administration. As there were no appropriate closure and reclamation implementations during and after the mining activity, major environmental impacts detected on the mine field. This study investigates the land use land cover change due to mining operations between 1987 and 2000. Landsat ETM+ imagery is selected. Maximum Likelihood estimation based on the Bayesian theorem is used for classification purposes. Change maps are produced to observe the differences in land use and land cover changes in the study area in comparison with the baseline of the region.