Tracking vegetation disturbance, recovery, and sustainability in open-pit mining areas of Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Region from 2000 to 2024

Evaluating the overarching efficacy of environmental rehabilitation initiatives and driving sustainable progress within open-pit mining areas heavily depends on the precise, sustained tracking of both vegetative degradation and its subsequent regenerative phases. Overcoming the bottlenecks of conventional methods in decoupling vegetation abrupt disturbances from gradual recovery processes, this research utilizes the Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Landsat data spanning from 2000 to 2024. The investigation explicitly targets open-pit mining areas across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Through the synergistic integration of the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) and an adaptively refined NDVI segmentation baseline, we extracted the spatiotemporal dynamics of abrupt vegetation disturbance and gradual recovery events. Furthermore, to rigorously quantify the enduring stability and long-term persistence of these vegetative successions, the study coupled the non-parametric Sen-MK trend estimator with calculations of the Hurst exponent. The results demonstrate that the F1 score for detecting disturbance and recovery events over the past 25 years stably exceeded 0.8, exhibiting excellent temporal robustness. The derived chronological trajectories pinpoint 2013 as a pivotal reversal node for regional ecological health. Before this critical juncture, the landscape suffered from intense degradation, marked by an average annual vegetative deficit of 962.19 ha. In the post-2013 era, a recovery-dominated paradigm emerged, characterized by an average yearly restoration of 831.37 ha. Crucially, the aggregate intensity of this ecological rehabilitation reached 1.64, substantially overshadowing the historical extraction-induced disturbance magnitude of 1.23. Concurrently, evaluations of trajectory persistence reveal that while a substantial 36.56% of the monitored landscape is undergoing sustained ecological enhancement, a concerning 22.46% persists in a state of relentless environmental deterioration. The acquired quantitative remote sensing evidence not only reveals the core role of macro-policy regulation in driving the reshaping of surface landscapes in mining areas but also provides solid scientific support for the future refined ecological governance of regional territorial space.