To better assess the spatial extent of mining facilities and their environmental impact, a research team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a satellite-based remote sensing tool (DOI: 10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2026.07.001). SHABA (Seasonal Harmonic Anomaly Break Analysis) is a satellite-based innovative tool to analyze spatial and temporal vegetational dynamics. SHABA is unique in its ability to factor in seasonal fluctuations and trends to reliably detect and quantify changes in vegetation. The researchers hope that SHABA will help better assess the global environmental impact of mining.
Metals are indispensable components of modern technologies from smartphones and computers to electric cars, solar and wind power plants. The global mining facilities built to extract them have significant environmental impacts. “In Europe, operators are obligated to ensure that their operations comply with the law. In other regions of the world, regulations may differ from ours,” says Prof. Richard Gloaguen, head of the Department of Exploration at HZDR’s Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology (HIF). “Up to now, the land footprint of global mining has been inadequately quantified because we had no remote sensing tool to reliably monitor and quantify the environmental impact of the thousands of mines worldwide that underpin metal supply chains.”
Reliably detecting changes in vegetation
And that is precisely the kind of tool that the research team led by Gloaguen has presented in its latest study. They developed SHABA, a remote, satellite-based sensing tool to reliably detect changes in vegetation around mining sites. “A crucial feature is SHABA’s ability to factor in typical seasonal changes in vegetation, such as leaf fall or blossoming periods, and also to compare data with previous years’ trends,” explains Vincent E. Nwazelibe, a scientist in Gloaguen’s research group and the study’s first author. “This allows SHABA to reliably detect changes in vegetation and pinpoint them precisely in space and time.”
In their study, the researchers used SHABA to scan the vegetation surrounding six mining sites on different continents and in different climatic zones. For each site, they analyzed satellite data of the vegetation within a radius of up to 100 kilometers from the sites from 2000 to 2025, generating over a hundred satellite images per year and site. “SHABA converts the vegetation data from the satellite images into a clear wave diagram, which makes it easy to see and quantify any significant changes in the vegetation at a specific location,” explains Dr. Samuel Thiele, head of the Digital Data Processing group in the Exploration Department at HIF. The changes in vegetation that SHABA picked up at the mining sites matched related events in the area at the given times: For example, loss of vegetation caused by deforestation—to expand a mining site or build an access road—or gradual gains in vegetation in the wake of recultivation efforts.
SHABA is freely accessible
“Our study demonstrated SHABA’s potential as a remote sensing tool for vegetational analysis in the vicinity of mining facilities across a wide variety of climatic regions around the world,” says Gloaguen. “We hope that SHABA will help quantify the land footprint of mines worldwide and that its unbiased remote sensing data will facilitate a better dialogue between stakeholders on both sides, mining and environmental protection.”
In further studies, the research team plans to use SHABA to analyze all mines worldwide and make the collected monitoring data available at no cost. The SHABA remote sensing tool is already freely accessible.
Publication:
V. E. Nwazelibe, M. Kirsch, S. T. Thiele, F. Djeddaoui, W. Yu, R. Gloaguen, R. Tolosana-Delgado, Monitoring mining impacts using harmonic decomposition of time series vegetation indices, in ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing , 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2026.07.001)
Further information:
Prof. Richard Gloaguen | Head of Exploration
Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology at HZDR
Phone: +49 351 260 4424 | Email: r.gloaguen@hzdr.de
Media contact:
Simon Schmitt | Head
Communications and Media Relations at HZDR
Phone: +49 351 260 3400 | Mobile: +49 175 874 2865 | Email: s.schmitt@hzdr.de
The Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) performs – as an independent German research center – research in the fields of energy, health, and matter. We focus on answering the following questions:
To help answer these research questions, HZDR operates large-scale facilities, which are also used by visiting researchers: the Ion Beam Center, the Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory and the ELBE Center for High-Power Radiation Sources.
HZDR is a member of the Helmholtz Association and has six sites (Dresden, Freiberg, Görlitz, Grenoble, Leipzig, Schenefeld near Hamburg) with almost 1,500 members of staff, of whom about 700 are scientists, including 200 Ph.D. candidates.
ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2026.07.001
Experimental study
Not applicable
Monitoring mining impacts using harmonic decomposition of time series vegetation indices
9-Jul-2026