Datasets:

NoraResearchLab
/

global-mining-areas

license: cc-by-sa-4.0
pretty_name: Global Mining Areas
tags:
  - geospatial
  - gis
  - mining
  - land-use
  - environmental
  - remote-sensing
  - geoparquet
task_categories:
  - other

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Global Mining Areas, Modernized

21,060 mining polygons covering 57,278 km² worldwide, representing the physical land footprint of mining activity — open-pit/open-cut areas, tailings dams, waste-rock dumps, water ponds, processing infrastructure, and other directly associated mining land use. Modernized from Maus et al. (2020)'s PANGAEA release into NORA's standardized schema. No new footprint delineation or reinterpretation is performed — attributes and geometries are preserved as published; only field names and container format are modernized.

Why This Dataset Matters

Where is the physical footprint of mining activity? (as opposed to a mineral-occurrence dataset, which answers where a deposit has been recorded). That makes it useful for:

Mining GIS
Environmental impact assessment
Land-use analysis
Mine footprint mapping
Mine-area statistics
Remote-sensing validation
Environmental monitoring
Mining-region analysis
Mineral-resource intelligence
Spatial joins with geology and geophysics
Geoscience AI/ML workflows

It can also be integrated with NORA's existing geological, tectonic, geophysical, mineral-occurrence, and environmental datasets to build richer spatial relationships.

Important Limitation

This is not a complete global inventory of every mine. The source dataset was constructed around mines reported as active at some point between 2000 and 2017, and the original authors explicitly state that it does not cover all existing mining locations worldwide. Treat this as a footprint map of the sites that were identified and mapped, not an exhaustive census.

geoparquet/global_mining_areas.parquet — primary format, mining polygons (EPSG:4326)
other_formats/global_mining_areas.geojson — secondary format
other_formats/global_mining_areas.gpkg — secondary format
metadata.json — provenance, citation, schema dictionary, license

Note: The source archive also includes validation points, a country-level area summary (CSV), and grid rasters at 30 arc-second, 5 arc-minute, and 30 arc-minute resolution. This run modernizes only the primary mining-polygons layer per NORA's standardized schema.

Schema

Field	Description
`mining_id`	Stable NORA feature identifier (derived from the source FID)
`country_code`	ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code (source: ISO3_CODE)
`country_name`	Country name (source: COUNTRY_NAME)
`area_km2`	Mining footprint area, square kilometers (source: AREA)
`geometry`	Mining polygon geometry, WGS84
`source_id`	Original PANGAEA feature identifier (source: FID)
`source_dataset`	Original dataset name
`source_doi`	PANGAEA DOI for the original dataset
`license`	License of the original dataset

Source & Citation

Maus, V., Giljum, S., Gutschlhofer, J., da Silva, D. M., Probst, M., Gass, S. L. B., Luckeneder, S., Lieber, M., & McCallum, I. (2020). Global-scale mining polygons (Version 1) [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.910894

Scientific Publication

Maus, V., Giljum, S., Gutschlhofer, J. et al. (2020). A global-scale data set of mining areas. Scientific Data, 7, 289. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00624-w

License

CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/