USMIN NATIONAL SCALE DATABASE OF ABANDONED MINE FEATURES

The United States contains hundreds of thousands of abandoned mine features, many of which pose physical or environmental hazards. To help inform decision makers and land managers of the scale of these hazards, the U.S. Geological Survey’s mineral deposit database project (USMIN) is collaborating with State, Federal, and Tribal agencies to build a comprehensive national inventory of abandoned hard rock, industrial mineral, and coal mine features in the United States. The USMIN project has been funded by the Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance of the Department of the Interior to build this database, which is a compilation of data from partner agencies.

The national-scale geospatial database contains point and polygon feature classes, and related tables that document physical and environmental hazards, and remediation status. The database structure was designed with input from multiple stakeholders and continues to evolve. This dynamic design allows USMIN to include different types of data when received from collaborators. As data is collected from partner agencies, it is translated from their database structure to the USMIN structure. After translation, each record is reviewed by a USMIN team member to ensure the integrity of the original agency’s data is maintained.

Since work began in 2023, USMIN has partnered with State and Federal agencies to incorporate and translate their data into the national database. As of February 2024, USMIN had received more than 290,000 records from these partners and our team has processed more than 260,000 of those records and added them to the database. We continue to meet with new partners to acquire new data, and to fill data gaps in the database. Due to the physical safety hazards at many abandoned mine features, individual feature locations will not be publicly available. Instead, data will be presented aggregated at different scales, such as at the county, congressional district, or watershed level. Our intent is to work with our partners to produce a living national-scale geospatial database that documents known abandoned mine features, captures new abandoned mine features when they are discovered, and documents the progress of remediation work.