Vegetation Changes in Alberta Oil Sands, Canada, Based on Remotely Sensed Data from 1995 to 2020
Vegetation Changes in Alberta Oil Sands, Canada, Based on Remotely Sensed Data from 1995 to 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.30564/jees.v4i2.4687 Received: 20 March 2022 | Revised: 2 June 2022 | Accepted: 8 June 2022 | Published Online: 16 June 2022 Abstract There are rich oil and gas resources in Alberta oil sand mining area in Canada. In the 1960s, the Canadian government decided to increase the mining intensity. However, the exploitation will bring many adverse effects. In recent years, more people pay attention to the environmental protection and ecological restoration of mining areas, such as issues related to changes in vegetated lands. Thus, the authors used the Landsat-5 TM and Landsat-8 OLI remote sensing images as the basic data sources, and obtained the land cover classification maps from 1995 to 2020 by ENVI. Based on the NDVI, NDMI and RVI, three images in each period are processed and output to explore the long-term impact of exploitation. The results show that from 1995...