Background The ecosystem monitoring of arid and semi-arid coal mining subsidence areas acts as a significant prerequisite for regional ecosystem conservation and management, holding critical significance for accelerating green mine construction.

Methods Based on the Chinese government's regulatory requirements for mine ecosystems, this study analyzed the difficulties in ecosystem monitoring in the coal mining subsidence area of the Shendong mining area (also referred to as the Shendong coal mining subsidence area). By detailing the integrated coal-rock-water-soil-air-vegetation-carbon monitoring technology system, this study determined the factors, principal methods, and technology roadmap for the integrated ecosystem monitoring in the Shendong coal mining subsidence area. Accordingly, this study delved into the spatiotemporal synergistic relationships of the space-air-tower-ground-laboratory multi-platform observations and then developed the Shendong ecosystem monitoring platform, which was applied to the integrated ecosystem monitoring in the Shendong coal mining subsidence area.

Results and Conclusions  The results indicate that the integrated ecosystem monitoring technology system, combined with the space-air-tower-ground-laboratory multi-platform observations, comprehensively accounts for the requirements of various regulatory authorities and the advantages of different observation platforms, achieves the synergistic analysis of multiple ecological factors and the coordination of various regulatory authorities, and fulfills the requirements of multiple regulatory authorities for indicator coverage and monitoring efficiency. The Shendong ecosystem monitoring platform, integrating models including the efficient organization and management model of multi-source data and the intelligent decision-making model, enables the management and spatiotemporal collaborative processing of multi-source heterogeneous big data, as well as the intelligent decision-making for ecological restoration based on the big data from multi-source monitoring, facilitating the ecological restoration engineering and routine plant care in the Shendong coal mining subsidence area. The integrated ecosystem monitoring technology has been applied in the green mine construction of the Shendong mining area, achieving encouraging outcomes in the decision-making for the optimization of plant types and planting density, the assessment of vegetation growth and soil moisture content, and the intelligent monitoring and acceptance check of plant quantities and survival rates in the restoration engineering. This study provides a typical case for ecosystem monitoring and management in arid and semi-arid coal mining subsidence areas.