MINEO is a shared-cost action contracted with the Directorate General for Information Society Technology of the EU in the framework of the 5th European Research and Technological Development programme. It gathers seven Geological Surveys members of EuroGeoSurveys , two mining companies, the Joint Research Centre from the EU and an environmental research centre. MINEO aims at developing tools and methods for assessing and monitoring the environmental impact of mining activities by means of combined Earth Observation and other relevant environmental data sets. MINEO is in particular designed to improve the hyperspectral imagery capabilities in mineral mapping in view of their use in the mapping of mining-related contaminated areas in European vegetated environments. The final objective is to develop the necessary tools for a further regular updating of environmental databases from future very high-resolution spaceborne missions.

The methodological developments are carried out over six mining test areas in various contexts representative of most of the environments encountered in Europe. Hyperspectral airborne data acquisition survey has been performed over these six test sites during summer 2000, using the HyMap hyperspectral imaging spectroradiometer, operated by HyVista Corporation, and flown at an altitude of 2000-2500 m above ground level. Simultaneous ground spectroradiometric measurements have been carried out for further radiometric calibration of the airborne data as well as for the generation of spectral libraries of contaminated areas.

Current methodological developments consist in the spectral identification of mining-related contaminated and impacted areas, the development of image-processing procedures or algorithms to map these areas, the development of GIS-models to exploit these data in an environmental risk assessment and monitoring perspective.

This paper presents examples of characterisation, identification and mapping of physical or chemical surface disturbances, indicators of environmental processes over the project test sites in Greenland, Finland, Austria, Germany, UK and Portugal.