Abstract: The exploitation of mineral resources has severely disturbed the ecological environment, which intensifies environmental risk in the mining area and seriously threatens the regional sustainable development. From the perspective of landscape ecology, the ecological environment of the mining area could be evaluated by combining landscape pattern and ecological risk, which could reveal the spatial-temporal heterogeneity of landscape ecological risk in the mining area and promote the sustainable utilization of land resources. Based on the land use data of seven issues of Landsat TM images from 1990 to 2018, the landscape ecological risk index was constructed, and the spatial-temporal heterogeneity of landscape ecological risk in Pingshuo mining area from 1990 to 2018 was explored by combining spatial statistics and geostatistical theories. The results showed that the spatial distribution of landscape ecological risk in Pingshuo mining area from 1990 to 2018 was concentrated. Moran’s I index ranged from 0.53 to 0.68. The Z score was much higher than the threshold of 1.96. The spatial agglomeration effect of risk was obvious. The landscape ecological risk level of Pingshuo mining area was dominated by medium-low, medium, and medium-high, accounting for 70%-90% of the total area in the whole region. The low risk areas were mainly distributed in Jingping Town and the large woodland of Baitang Town and Xiangyangbao Town. Arable land was the main distribution areas of medium risk, while the high risk areas gradually shrank to the mining core areas within the mine boundary. The random variation in the spatial heterogeneity of landscape ecological risk in Pingshuo mining area was less than the spatial autocorrelation variation from 1990 to 2018. The spatial heterogeneity caused by the spatial autocorrelation was dominant. These results indicated that at the scale of 0.50 km×0.50 km, landscape ecological risk in Pingshuo mining area had strong spatial-temporal heterogeneity from 1990 to 2018, with a temporal trend of increasing first and then decreasing, and with significant spatial correlation and obvious spatial differentiation characteristics.

Key words: ecological risk, landscape pattern, spatial autocorrelation, spatial-temporal heterogeneity, Pingshuo mining area.