Assessment Algorithm for Plant Communities of Natural Biota in Areas of Mine Dust Deposition

The article presents an assessment algorithm for vegetation in areas of coal dust pollution. Two problems are solved: delineation of a dust pollution area by the Enhanced Coal Dust Index with data clustering; calculation of vegetation indexes in selected clusters for the vegetation analysis. Clustering used the Hill Climbing algorithm. The source data were Sentinel-2 imagery obtained during the spring and summer seasons. The algorithm was tested as a case-study of the mining area of the Urgal Coal Mine in the Khabarovsk Krai. The test data for a period one year long show the vegetation damage on drawing nearer the test mine area.