Evaluation of environmental damage in clandestine mining

Abstract

Remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) are remote sensing platforms with capabilities for taking images at various altitudes, proving to be an alternative with great potential for acquiring geospatial data remotely. In addition to the imaging capacity, RPAs serve as transport for other sensors for geo-ecological applications such as Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR). If associated with the photogrammetric technique, obtaining geometrically corrected planimetry and altimetry data, the results and products derived from RPAs gain satisfactory quality for precise environmental analyzes that can be useful in estimating mining volumes. Therefore, the objective of this work is to evaluate the environmental damage and losses caused by the irregular mining of ore carried out at Fazenda Mina do Vigia. The temporal photogrammetric data available on the Google Earth platform, as well as those obtained by LIDAR, show a large removal of excavated material over the years. Based on the LIDAR altimetry, it was possible to calculate the volume of excavation carried out in 2009, as well as the comparison with the data obtained from RPAs allowed an accurate estimate of irregularly mined mining. The study concluded that more than 17 tons of materials were extracted, financially valued at 5.6 million reais.