Ecological risk of vegetation caused by resource exploitation in the Northern Shaanxi energy & chemical industry base

Whether groundwater and coal exploitation will destroy the eco-environment and how much risk they will bring to the ecological safety are inevitable subjects in the process of resource development and eco-environmental protection in the Northern Shaanxi Energy & Chemical Industry Base. In this study, the eolian sand beach area, whose eco-environment is most fragile in the Northern Shaanxi Energy & Chemical Industry Base, was selected as the study area, and based on the relationship between the depth of water table and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), the relationship between the types of vegetation communities and NDVI corresponding to different geomorphological types and different water table depths was established. The authors used the MODFLOW software to construct the numerical groundwater flow model of the eolian sand beach area and the Monte Carlo method to construct a stochastic model of vegetation ecology. According to the relationship between the depth of water table and NDVI, the groundwater flow model and vegetation ecological model were coupled. The risk of potential changes of vegetation ecology caused by groundwater and coal exploitation was then forecasted and assessed.