Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and Natural Resources 2019 number 1

For characterizing the environmental status of mining areas, a geoecological assessment procedure was proposed, which was tested using the case of the Novokuznetskii district of Kemerovo oblast. Twenty-two landscapes forming part of three provinces in the Salair Kuznetsk Alatau mountain region dominated by forest landscapes of low mountains were used as operational territorial units of the environment analysis. The geoecological assessment of geosystems involved using ArcGIS-based comparison (in a matrix form) of the degree of anthropogenic transformation and sustainability of landscapes. For each of the eight types and categories of lands identified from analyzing satellite images and thematic maps, with the region’s mining specialization taken into account, we determined the value of the coefficient of anthropogenic transformation. On the basis of the schematic map developed for the structure of economic use, for each landscape contour we calculated the area-weighted mean coefficient of anthropogenic transformation. For the Novokuznetskii district, landscapes of three levels of geoecological stability were identified: relatively stable, stable and very stable. On the whole, within the Novokuznetskii district the largest proportion corresponds to watershed slope landscapes of Kuznetsk Alatau with fir-aspen chern taiga and the valleys of small rivers and brooks distinguished by a very stable geoecological state (66.8 % of the area). The algorithm developed for geoecological assessment is quite versatile and can be applied to territories of other hierarchical levels.