The demand for coal resources is increasing with economic development in China. But, the rich mineral resources along with the intensive mining activities, which have led to a lot of ecological and environmental problems, such as environmental pollution, ecological destruction and geological disasters. Eco-risk assessment is an important tool for effective ecological environment management with evaluations of the likelihood and degree of harm.
Thus, this paper applied landscape eco-risk assessment methods to estimate the level of the opencast mine area eco-risk. But also the ESDA(Exploratory spatial data analysis) methods were used to analyze the spatial association characteristic of landscape eco-risk in mining area. It turned out that those high-risk areas is the core of the spatial distribution of Landscape eco-risk and from high-risk to low-risk present ring features. In addition, high-risk is mainly distributed in the mining industry and city life areas, sources of which are the mining, coal gangue tie up land and city construction activities. Medium-risk are mainly distributed in nature, half natural functional areas, the main sources of which are the city life and the agricultural production activities. Low-risk areas are covered by sparse vegetation, such as shrub and grassland. However, in research areas, vegetation degradation, soil and water loss leads to the regional ecological base quality was poor. So the ecosystems and environmental factors are fragile here. Moreover, the frequent production activities in mining areas cause more serious ecological and environment problems. The risk degree of the artificial area is higher than the half natural area, and the half natural area is higher than the natural area. It is conform to the conventional law of ecological risk level difference. At the same time, based on the ESDA of the landscape eco-risk in opencast mine area, the space correlation of the risk is up to 0.7521, which indicate that the agglomeration features of the risk obviously. Different characteristics of agglomeration provide the basis for the ecological and environment management. Space differentiation study of Landscape eco-risk in this opencast mine area shows that interference are the main driving factors in the high-risk and low-risk areas. But in the medium-risk area, fragile degree is the main driving factors. With the increase of human interference, landscape lost diversity and tend to simplification. The results of the study on the mining area provide certain data support and theoretical basis to environment management.