---
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.
## Contents
- `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/