MineSegSat: an automated system to evaluate mining disturbed area extents from Sentinel-2 imagery

Assessing the environmental impact of the mining industry plays a critical role in understanding and mitigating the ecological consequences of extractive activities. This paper presents MineSegSAT, a model that presents a novel approach to predicting environmentally impacted areas within mining land regions using the SegFormer deep learning segmentation architecture trained on Sentinel-2 data. The data was collected from non-overlapping regions over Western Canada in 2021 containing areas of land that have been environmentally impacted by mining activities that were identified from high-resolution satellite imagery in 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00805-6). The SegFormer architecture, a state-of-the-art semantic segmentation framework, is employed to leverage its advanced spatial understanding capabilities for accurate land cover classification. We investigate the efficacy of loss functions including Dice, Tversky, and Lovasz loss respectively and evaluate model performance based on F1-score, precision, recall, and accuracy. The trained model was utilized for inference over the same areas in the ensuing year to identify potential areas of expansion or contraction over these same periods. The Sentinel-2 data is made available on Amazon Web Services through a collaboration with Earth Daily Analytics which provides corrected and tiled analytics-ready data on the AWS platform. The model and ongoing API to access the data on AWS allow the creation of an automated tool to monitor the extent of disturbed areas surrounding known mining sites to ensure compliance with their environmental impact goals.