Delineation and evaluation of the captive limestone mining area change and its influence on the environment using multispectral satellite images for industrial long-term sustainability

Dynamics in Limestone mining sites are usually subjected to spatiotemporal land cover change, which has a long-term impact on the land and environment. The objectives of this article are mapping demarcation, and transformation assessment of active captive limestone mines and their impact assessment on the environment at the Yerraguntla cement industrial region in YSR Kadapa district, Andhra Pradesh, India from the year 2006–2019 using Remote Sensing & Geographical Information System (RS&GIS). In this research work, first, the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) is computed, second NDVI image is resampled using NDVI threshold values, and the Nearest-Neighbor sampling method uses the QGIS raster calculator, which produces the mines area of 469.92 ha with Sentinel-2A MSI and 555.39 ha with Landsat-8(OLI) which is evaluated with delineated high resolution (∼1m/pixels) Google Earth image (486.47 ha) from Google Earth Pro (freeware) and industry reports (487.10 ha) in 2019. Third active mines are demarcated using NDVI breakpoints. Results found that the limestone Mining area increased by 206.10% from 2006 to 2019, with Producer's Accuracy (PA), User's Accuracy (UA), and Kappa coefficients of 98.82%, 92.79%, and 0.92 in 2019, and 96.74%, 85.17 %t, and 0.82 in 2006. The compatibility between Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A NDVI images is determined with Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.84 in 2019. In 2019, a linear negative Regression slope was revealed between NDVI & LST with a Correlation coefficient of 0.248, indicating negative environmental influences and vegetation control on LST. This research will aid industry and environmental engineers in comprehending the effects of limestone mine changes on LST and proposing an environmentally acceptable land-environmental management plan for long-term sustainability.