Paper published in Discover Sustainability. Multi-temporal satellite mapping of coal mine expansion and forest loss in the Hasdeo Arand Forest, India

Created on May 31, 2026

2026   ·   publication

I am happy to share that our article “Multi-temporal satellite mapping of coal mine expansion and forest loss in the Hasdeo Arand Forest, India” has been published in Discover Sustainability.

Veeravalli, S.G., Khan, A. & Qadri, S.H. Multi-temporal satellite mapping of coal mine expansion and forest loss in the Hasdeo Arand Forest, India. Discov Sustain 7, 775 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-03526-w

This paper started in a rather unexpected way.

I first came across Hasdeo Arand through an Instagram post shared by Adil Khan. The post stayed with me. It reminded me of another case I had worked on earlier, Rushikonda Hill, where official records were limited, ground-level information was difficult to access, and satellite imagery offered one of the few ways to independently document landscape change.

That made me think: could a similar satellite-based approach help reconstruct what has been happening in Hasdeo Arand?

Over one weekend, I started looking at satellite images of the Parsa East and Kente Basan (PEKB) coal mine. The results were striking. I first shared the analysis as a blog post on my website, and the response was far stronger than I expected — especially from colleagues and friends from the Wildlife Institute of India, where I began my professional journey. Many of them work closely with forests, wildlife, and conservation challenges on the ground, and several encouraged me to turn the analysis into a peer-reviewed publication.

When I began reworking the blog into a paper, the main motivation was simple: if this analysis could be useful in any way to local communities, researchers, conservation practitioners, or people working on environmental sustainability and forest governance, then it would be worth doing.

But I also knew my own limits. I could bring the satellite image analysis and geospatial perspective, but Hasdeo Arand needed deeper ecological and conservation context. So I reached out to my friends and former WII colleagues Adil Khan and Syed Hazeem Qadri, who understand these landscapes and issues much better than I do. They were immediately interested, and this paper became a collaboration.

It also made the research-world version of that Instagram meme feel very real: the adult version of “let’s hang out soon” is “let’s write a paper together.” Especially when your friends are in different parts of the world.

In the paper, we reconstructed the expansion of the PEKB open-cast coal mine from 2013 to 2025 using Landsat 8, PlanetScope, and historical high-resolution imagery. We found that:

  • The mine footprint expanded from 218 ha in 2013 to 1,389 ha by mid-2025
  • Approximately 1,013 ha of closed-canopy forest were converted within the mine footprint
  • By 2025, 73% of the final footprint overlapped land that was forested at the beginning of the study period
  • Expansion occurred in distinct phases, including rapid growth, a slowdown, and renewed acceleration after 2023

For me, the broader point is that satellite imagery can help create transparent, time-resolved records of environmental change, especially in landscapes where ground information is fragmented, contested, or difficult to access. These records cannot replace field knowledge, community experience, or ecological surveys — but they can provide an independent spatial baseline for asking better questions.

I am truly thankful to Adil Khan and Syed Hazeem Qadri for joining this work, and I hope we continue to extend this research further.

Sai Ganesh Veeravalli