Enhanced mapping and monitoring of mine tailings based on Landsat ETM+ and SPOT 5 fusion in the North of Tunisia

Mine tailings constitute an alarming source of pollution that threatens soils, vegetation and human health around Jebel Hallouf-Bouaouane mine site. Because of their widespread geographical distribution; their location and extent, the characterization of mine tailings using traditional field work alone is both costly and inefficient. In this study, we explore remote sensing techniques based on multispectral and multisensory data fusion. Our contribution consists in enhanced mine tailing map generation using both SPOT 5 panchromatic and Landsat ETM+ multispectral data. Results of the linear spectral unmixing of the resulting hybrid image tend to field truth. The inter-comparison of unmixing results indicates that this methodology can be applied successfully to multispectral data for multi-temporal monitoring of mine tailings.