Impact of underground coal mining on land ecology and its restoration in windy and sandy region

The energy “Golden Triangle” region, most part of which locates in windy and sandy region, has been playing an important role in China’s energy development.Impact of underground coal mining on regional ecology is directly related to the sustainable development of the mining industry and local region.Based on long-term monitoring and previous research results, the impact of underground coal mining on land ecology and its restoration methods are studied systematically.The study indicates that: the monitoring method of land ecology plays a key role in revealing the impact of underground coal mining on land ecology.The method of multi-source information collection and processing dominated by underground mining information, and dynamic and long-term field monitoring are more effective.Coal mining produces certain impact on land ecology such as surface deformation, cracks, soil moisture, soil physical and chemical properties and vegetation growth in windy and sandy region.However, most of these factors are characterized by self-healing and natural restoration in a relative short period except margin cracks of subsidence basin.This region should adopt “partition” differentiated ecological restoration model, which means that the uniform subsidence region conduct “natural closure” restoration, and the differential subsidence region conduct artificial-induced restoration model which gives priority to phytoremediation supplemented with appropriate engineering restoration.Meanwhile, it should adopt the concurrent mining and reclamation model which consists of super-large working face and concurrent subsidence and ground cracks filling, aiming to reach reduction of land ecological damage and restoration in time