Sensing Coal Legacies: A Comparative Analysis of the Jiu Valley and Boone-Raleigh County Mining Regions using Satellite Images
Sensing Coal Legacies: A Comparative Analysis of the Jiu Valley and Boone-Raleigh County Mining Regions using Satellite Images

Summary/Abstract: In Appalachia and South Carpathia, a long tradition of coal exploitation has left deep tracesin the environment and the socio-economic profile of (former) mining towns. The presentstudy set out from the question of how coal legacies are reflected in satellite images of theJiu Valley, and the Boone and Raleigh counties in West Virginia. To this end, we used remotesensing techniques to analyze the urban and environmental developments in these regionson the basis of two snapshots taken in 1986 and 2019. Our results suggest that, even if thecoal mining techniques used, the national political regimes, and the topography of the landdiffer to a great extent, in the studied regions there exist similar patterns of socio-economicdecline and environmental transformation, which are discussed in the paper.

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