COMPREHENSIVE EFFECTIVENESS EVALUATION OF ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION IN OPEN-PIT COAL MINES USING ENTROPY WEIGHT-TOPSIS: A CASE STUDY FROM CHINA

As environmental concerns over open-pit coal mining increase, the need for effective ecological restoration assessment methods becomes critical.This study presents a novel framework that combines the Entropy Weight Method and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for evaluating the ecological restoration effectiveness of five representative open-pit coal mines in China.The Entropy Weight Method objectively quantifies the weights of multiple indicators, including soil erosion rate, vegetation coverage, and water quality, ensuring a balanced and data-driven assessment.TOPSIS is then applied to rank the mines based on their closeness to the ideal restoration level.Case study results demonstrate that this combined approach can accurately reflect the real-world effectiveness of different restoration measures, with mines exhibiting higher vegetation cover and improved environmental quality receiving higher rankings.The integration of entropy-based weighting and multi-criteria decision analysis provides an objective and practical tool for evaluating restoration outcomes.This method assists decision-makers and practitioners in identifying best practices, optimizing strategies, and promoting sustainable land use in mining areas, and is adaptable to similar ecological restoration assessment scenarios elsewhere.