Paper Title
Environmental Impact Assessment Of Surface Gold Mining On Land Cover: A Case Study Of Cukuralan, Izmir, Turkey

Mining is an extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, which involves the removal of vegetation, soil, and rocks. Mining itself, along with infrastructure associated with mining, such as roads and mining camps, results in several environmental impacts such as deforestation. Environmental consequences due to Land Use/Land Cover changes (LULC) can be monitored and determined efficiently using remote sensing techniques. The objective of this paper is to analyse LULC changes especially in the forest and mining areas by using Landsat TM and OLI data through years 1989 to 2017. In this context, supervised classification method and different spectral indices such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) were applied to both Landsat 5 (2009-2010) and Landsat 8 (2017) image datasets to demonstrate the total changes during the mine construction. Finally, the LULC changes were evaluated by comparison of the output thematic maps produced using change detection methods. Keywords - Remote sensing, Gold mining site, Multi-temporal Landsat data, Change detection.