LAMES: A Large-Scale and Artisanal Mining Environmental Segmentation Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces LAMES, a comprehensive dataset of large-scale and artisanal mining sites with detailed annotations, aimed at monitoring environmental impacts and illegal activities.

Contribution

The work provides a large-scale, annotated dataset of mining sites, facilitating research on environmental monitoring and illegal mining detection.

Findings

Contains 150 large-scale mining sites with detailed attributes.

Includes 870 km^2 of artisanal mining area annotations.

Discusses ethical considerations and potential research applications.

Abstract

Mining operations are of utmost importance to the economy of some nations. However, such operations result in land-use change, very high energy consumption, and negative impacts on the environment, including soil erosion and deforestation. The mining process can impact an area much larger than the mining site itself. Adding to the negative externalities linked to mining is the fact that, in addition to government-sanctioned legal mining operations, illegal mining is widespread, including in various countries of Africa. The ability to monitor remote mining site activities can be useful, e.g., for the detection of illegal artisanal mining activities and their environmental impacts. An important outcome of such monitoring could include a better understanding of the interrelationship between mine facility attributes (e.g., mining types, processing methods, commodities, etc.) and their impact on the natural environment. In this work, we present a data set that contains 150 Large Scale Mining (LSM) sites and 870km^2 annotated area of Artisanal Small-scale Mining (ASM) sites. The metadata includes nine eminent LSM sections and 27 mining site attributes for each LSM site. We also discuss the data set's possible contribution to the research community, social and environmental consequences, and researchers' responsibilities from an ethics perspective.