FRACTAL GEOMETRY APPLIED IN COMPUTER GRAPHICS MODELLING FOR ASSESSING FOREST PLANT SYSTEMS FROM THE MOTRUROVINARI COAL BASIN.

The Motru-Rovinari coal basin is placed in South-West Development Region on an area of about 522.54 km2 and is part of Oltenia mining region. Since the 50-60's (1955- 1960) it was opened here the open cast mining from which was extracted lignite, a quality charcoal. There followed the years of communism when were opened many fronts of exploitation and now has over 50 quarries, micro quarries, dumps and mining extraction. Opening and exploiting the high capacity of coal in this extractions unit, needed to find solutions for the storage of residual material (tailings) have required that large areas of land to set aside from the agricultural, forestry or construction circuit, all with negative impact on the environment. Of these, the deforestation had the biggest impact and on them acted most aggressive in this process of expanding coal mining pits. This work wants to propose a methodology to assess and quantify the forestry systems from an area strong anthropized by mining activities: the Motru-Rovinari coal basin. This way will be noticed and inventory the wooded areas or destroyed using fractal geometry in graphic modelling by determining two indicators: the fractal dimension (FD) and Fractal Spectrum (FS). Comparing with this methodology will be used other techniques and data from remote sensing and GIS, applying the NDVI analysis in estimation of changes at vegetation level, by choosing the supervised classification algorithm to provide both spatial and numerical results on assessments. In this study will be used information provided by sets of Landsat satellite images, from August 1980 to April 2015. We are looking to determine the best methods for monitoring the impact of mining activities over the environment, mainly on forest systems to signal possible unbalances and prevent natural hazards. In the context of the economic policies of the last 50 years, both locally and nationally, focus was placed on discover and exploit new energy resources, without always find mining methods and processes with the minimal impact the environment. Such human activities have become the main factor in generating environmental changes, and between this, the surface mining is one of the most destructive activities that take place on the earth surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]