The responsible management of Earth’s environment is one of today’s most pressing concerns. Sound environmental management of mining activities avoids high remediation costs, which frequently drain public funds. Surface and groundwater pollution, soil contamination, and terrain instability all cause damage that can affect urban and sub-urban areas. Understanding and monitoring pollution processes in mining areas is therefore of concern to a very wide user community, including central government bodies or agencies, local authorities, industry, environmental groups and individual citizens.

The general objective of the project is to develop hyperspectral remote sensing methods that can be used to measure and monitor mining and pollution at less cost and to common standards across the EU.

Strategic objective

The land surface and sub-surface provides the physical infrastructure for all human activities. The European mining and extractive industry contributes about 7% of the gross domestic product of the EU from this resource and feeds essential raw materials to all other EU industries at local, regional and EU-wide scales. However the European mining industry is facing increasing environmental pressure and regulatory controls. Industrialists and decision-makers need innovative and cost-effective tools for environmental data acquisition and processing that provide the sound basis for a dialogue ensuring the sustainable economic development of the mineral industry. Future decision making will need to be developed within the frame of the ESDP (European Spatial Development Perspective) to be promulgated in May 1999.

The strategic objectives of this project are to develop the components of a possible future decision making tool for use in environmental planning, and to disseminate knowledge and generate awareness of the role that can be played by Earth Observation data in this process.

Scientific objective

The MINEO project aims to:

Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and Environmental Management Plans (EMP) can take advantage of regularly updated environmental database layers related to mining environments. Innovative Earth Observation (EO) techniques being developed by the Consortium of European Geological Surveys members of EuroGeoSurveys Remote Sensing Topic Network and their partners can meet this demand. Hyperspectral imaging sensors produce data that can characterise the chemical and/or mineralogical composition of the imaged ground surface. The primary advantages of this future space-borne imaging technique are the reduction in conventional, time-consuming and expensive field sampling methods and their capability to gather repeat data and so monitor mining pollution.

Earth Observation data, when integrated into Geographic Information Systems and combined with other data relevant to environmental concerns, have been proven valuable in the environmental impact assessment of mining, both at local and regional scales. In particular, they can be used in the production of pollution-risk maps around mining areas. It is therefore proposed to develop the contribution of various Earth Observation techniques further. The most advanced current airborne hyperspectral sensors will be used to detect mine-waste pollution and soil/aquifer contamination. In particular, their capabilities in detecting and discriminating major pollutants will be assessed and validated during field campaigns.

Regular acquisition of such high-resolution, remotely sensed geographic information will help the Community to set up a realistic, sustainable and coherent environmental management and monitoring strategy at European scale.

The project presented by the Consortium intends to:

Furthermore, the transfer of relevant know-how and technologies will assist the competitiveness of European organisations and industries within the developing global market for environmental management systems.

The work will develop innovative and cost effective earth-observation tools and information system methods to answer the strategic and scientific objectives and further facilitate the establishment of EIA’s and EMP's, with particular emphasis on: