Mapping the yearly extent of surface coal mining in Central Appalachia using Landsat and Google Earth Engine — First Mining Year (GeoTIFF)

These data accompany the 2018 manuscript published in PLOS One titled "Mapping the yearly extent of surface coal mining in Central Appalachia using Landsat and Google Earth Engine". In this manuscript, researchers used the Google Earth Engine platform and freely-accessible Landsat imagery to create a yearly dataset (1985 through 2015) of surface coal mining in the Appalachian region of the United States of America.

This specific dataset is a GeoTIFF file depicting when an area was first mined, from the period 1985 through 2015. The raster values depict the year that mining was first detected by the paper's processing model. A year of "1984" indicates mining that likely started at some point prior to 1985. These pre-1985 mining data are derived from a prior study; see https://skytruth.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SkyTruth-MTR-methodology.pdf for more information. This dataset does not indicate for how long an area was a mine or when mining ceased in a given area.