Investigation of Land Use and Land Cover Using Temporal Satellite Images Surrounding The Open Cast Coal Mining Project, Mancherial, Telangana (India)

Abstract

Land use and land cover (LULC) products play crucial for researching LULC change as well as environmental and social issues. Rapid changes in LULC brought on by industrial operations such as open-cast coal mining pose serious problems to natural ecosystems, requiring careful observation in order to manage the environment sustainably. Multi-temporal satellite imagery and spatial data analytical methods were used to assess Land Surface Temperature (LST) for the periods of 2021 to 2026. Supervised classification and evaluations in accuracy disclosed that the overall accuracies of Sentinel-2’s sharper resolution and bands with red-edge was improved by 3–5%, especially for fine-scale characteristics, such as limits of mining areas. One of the most significant LULC transitions was a 23% change from agriculture and vegetation land to built-up regions, which reflected urbanization brought on by mining leads to temperature rise in Build-up/Barren land, decrease in vegetation cover around 75% and water bodies area increase around 24%. These results demonstrate the value of high-resolution images for environmental monitoring and the effectiveness of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System approaches for LULC mapping in mining regions. This study supports data-driven mitigation of climate change and sustainable land management initiatives by providing a framework for decision-makers to solve environmental deprivation caused by mining.