EuroMineNet: A Multitemporal Sentinel-2 Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Mining Footprint Analysis in the European Union (2015-2024)
This work addresses the need for consistent, long-term monitoring of mining footprints for sustainable resource management and environmental governance in the EU, representing an incremental advancement by providing a new benchmark dataset.
The paper tackles the problem of monitoring mining-induced environmental degradation by introducing EuroMineNet, a comprehensive multitemporal benchmark dataset spanning 133 mining sites in the EU from 2015 to 2024, which enables analysis of environmental dynamics at a continental scale and reveals that GeoAI methods effectively identify long-term changes but struggle with short-term dynamics.
Mining activities are essential for industrial and economic development, but remain a leading source of environmental degradation, contributing to deforestation, soil erosion, and water contamination. Sustainable resource management and environmental governance require consistent, long-term monitoring of mining-induced land surface changes, yet existing datasets are often limited in temporal depth or geographic scope. To address this gap, we present EuroMineNet, the first comprehensive multitemporal benchmark for mining footprint mapping and monitoring based on Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery. Spanning 133 mining sites across the European Union, EuroMineNet provides annual observations and expert-verified annotations from 2015 to 2024, enabling GeoAI-based models to analyze environmental dynamics at a continental scale. It supports two sustainability-driven tasks: (1) multitemporal mining footprint mapping for consistent annual land-use delineation, evaluated with a novel Change-Aware Temporal IoU (CA-TIoU) metric, and (2) cross-temporal change detection to capture both gradual and abrupt surface transformations. Benchmarking 20 state-of-the-art deep learning models reveals that while GeoAI methods effectively identify long-term environmental changes, challenges remain in detecting short-term dynamics critical for timely mitigation. By advancing temporally consistent and explainable mining monitoring, EuroMineNet contributes to sustainable land-use management, environmental resilience, and the broader goal of applying GeoAI for social and environmental good. We release the codes and datasets by aligning with FAIR and the open science paradigm at https://github.com/EricYu97/EuroMineNet.