Ecological Systems and Devices Annotation << Back METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT OF TECHNOGENIC CHANGES IN THE SUBSURFACE DURING MINING Yu.P. Galchenko The problem of environmental safety in the development of mineral resources has two significant aspects. On the one hand, the dynamic increase in the demand for mineral raw materials leads to a constant increase in the total anthropogenic load on the natural biota of the Earth, and on the other – the negative impact of each particular mining enterprise is always limited in time due to the depletion of reserves of any field. The study of ecosystem stability should lead to a quantitative assessment is possible in terms of preservation of each ecosystem, the level of anthropogenic impact on her, and the study of causality in the process of formation of this impact should determine the process of achieving a biologically determined threshold for each of technogenic factors. In general, the task of ensuring the environmental safety of subsurface development can be solved only by regulating the processes of technogenic degradation of biota and making it reversible by changing the applied mining technologies. The features of geotechnologies that determine their impact on natural biota primarily depend on the state of the developed space created during the extraction of minerals, and the method of destruction of the lithosphere substance during mining operations. Technogenic factors of mining production affect all the geospheres of the Earth, destroying or changing their state. The general structure of the technogenic impact of a mining enterprise on the environment can be represented as a systematic unity of the static component in the form of a rigidly organized set of impacts determined by the very fact of technogenic destruction of the lithosphere during mining and the dynamic component in the form of highly variable impacts, the nature and level of which depends on the geotechnological solutions used in specific conditions of development. Keywords: methodology; assessment; technogenic factors; complex subsurface development; lithosphere; hydrosphere; atmosphere; structure of technogenic impact; biota; ecosystems. DOI: 10.25791/esip.04.2021.1222 Pp. 32-43.