Impacts of Coal Mining on the Aboveground Vegetation and Soil Quality: A Case Study of Qinxin Coal Mine in Shanxi Province, China

The exploitation and utilization of coal resources have been lasting for thousands of years, resulting in a series of ecological environmental problems in China. So far, the mining area has changed into severe and typical damaged ecosystem locally and globally. The coal exploitation history is long in Shanxi province, but goafs are distributed widely. In this study, we addressed this point and took a coal mine, located in Shanxi province where the coal mining has a long exploitation history with goaf densely distributed, as an example. The growth patterns of above ground plant communities, succession characteristics of vegetation community and soil quality characters in the goafs, which could provide theoretical basis for the sustainable development of coal resources and ecological reconstruction in this region, have been studied.