Restoring coal mine degraded lands in India for achieving the United Nations‐Sustainable Development Goals

Native Plant Species: a Tool for Restoration of Mined Lands

The COVID-19 epidemic, food and water insecurity, and the climate emergency have impacted the lives of billions of people worldwide. Ecosystems play a crucial role in tackling these problems. Hence, it is a prime necessity to keep the ecosystems safe and sustainably manage the resources. But this would not suffice for the protection and sustainable management of our surviving natural landscapes and oceans; we also need to restore the planet's devastated ecosystems and the enormous benefits they give. Mining exerts a lot of pressure on the land resources further depleting the fertility of the soil. The overburdened dumps are devoid of the nutrients which turns natural succession at a slow pace. The restoration of the degraded mined areas is essential to re-establish the ecological balance so that a self-sustaining ecosystem can be maintained. The plantation of selected species of plants could be a sustainable and organic tool for the restoration of the degraded mined land. In today's context, various ways regarding ecological restoration are suggested, but the native plant species plantation is the best tool for restoring the degraded land at a quicker pace. The present paper reviews the importance of the native plant species and their efficacy in restoring degraded mined land based on area and time of succession and climax.

Exploring the last 50 years of Indian research on the impact of coal mining using bibliometric analysis with an overview of water-related impacts

This paper throws light on the bibliometric review of the impact of coal mining in India over the past 50 years, emphasizing environmental, especially water-related impacts. The data were refined from the Web of Science database and analyzed in a bibliometric map visualization software tool, VOSviewer, to grasp the research focus, status quo and analyze the trend and direction of the work being carried out in this area. The methodology was covered in three phases: search and document selection, software and data extraction, and analysis of results and trends. The study results indicated that (i) the publication has increased in the past two decades (2001-2021) with a steep increase in the period from 2010 to 2021 with 74.68% article types documents and a mere 7.74% review documents. (ii) In India, the significant contribution is made by the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad with Department of Science and Technology as a primary funding agency. (iii) The bibliometric map of co-occurrence of author keywords showed that keywords relating to the "pollution" (connected to air, water) from "Jharia coalfield" have highest occurrences in the relevant published works of literature and topics like "reclamation," "mine spoil," and application of approaches like "remote sensing and GIS" have lower linkage strengths in general. (iv) The result of the co-citation network study has marked the most significant authors and the highly cited sources of the database revealing Ghose M.K. and Singh A.K. as among the most cited authors with citations more than 150 in the field of our interest. (v) The trend of publication in the research area of Water Resources showed a significant increase after 2015. The keyword occurrence map reveals that water quality studies have been extensively studied, but quantifications of the coal mining-induced changes in water regimes at river basin scales are absent.