Mining

Mining is SkyTruth's collection of datasets and tools on mountaintop removal (MTM) coal mining in Central Appalachia, covering parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. MTM clears forests, blasts away ridge tops and dumps waste rock into valleys; SkyTruth states that valley fills have buried roughly 2,000 miles of streams across Appalachia.

The core product is an annual mine-footprint dataset. Mine extent is detected by applying NDVI thresholds to Landsat annual greenest-pixel composites, a method developed with Appalachian Voices and Duke University and published in PLOS ONE in 2018. The record runs from 1985 to the latest year using Landsat 4-9 imagery, and a provisional series back to 1973 uses Landsat 1-3 MSS imagery; NAIP aerial imagery is used for accuracy assessment. The dataset is updated each November, with the newest year released as provisional.

The data can be downloaded as GeoJSON, Shapefile and GeoTIFF, together with Earth Engine scripts and a mine land recovery dataset from the Central Appalachian Mine Reforestation Assessment. Since December 2025 an OGC-compliant Mining API, documented in a Python notebook, serves the mining detections alongside state and federal permit boundaries, counties, USGS watershed units and abandoned mine features from e-AMLIS, so users can query a specific area or intersect footprints with permits.

All data are free to use. The mining datasets are released under the Apache License 2.0, and SkyTruth's terms limit use of its products to environmental conservation applications. Users quoted by SkyTruth include Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Appalachian Voices and a University of Pennsylvania statistics professor, and University of Kentucky epidemiologists used the data in a 2022 PLOS ONE study of birth defects.