Application of LiDAR Techniques to Monitoring of Eco-Environment in Mining Areas

There are several disadvantages of the application of the traditional remote sensing (RS) technique to monitoring the eco-environment of mining areas, such as failure to explore vertical structure, low spatial resolution and poor time efficiency, etc. The technique of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) could offset these disadvantages of the traditional RS technique thanks to its features of stronger initiative, stronger penetrability, faster scanning speed, higher spatial resolution, etc. Problems in the eco-environments of mining areas were first classified; principles, types and merits of the LiDAR technique introduced; based on the comparison between the LiDAR technique and the traditional remote-sensing techniques, applicability of the LiDAR technique in monitoring of the eco-environments of mining areas and potentiality of its application to monitoring the eco-environmental indices of typical mining areas were discussed. Results show that the LiDAR technique can be used to monitor variations of most of the indices of the eco-environment, such as damage of ecological integrity, land destruction in mining areas, and natural soil erosion, with higher accuracy resolutions than the traditional RS technique. Besides, its advantage in extracting the parameter of vertical structure of the vegetation is apparent. However, its applicability in extracting various indices varies because of differences in scale of the mining areas and accuracy requirement for monitoring of the eco-environment. The three-dimensional point cloud data of terrestrial LiDAR could not only be used as a complementary data source for optical RS, and once combined with the airborne LiDAR, it is capable of fulfilling all the requirements of higher resolution and accuracy and extraction of the parameter of vegetation structure at a larger scale.