Mine Tailings Mapping Using Landsat Multispectral Imagery of the Versant Basin Amont of Medjerda River in the North of Tunisia

In the north of Tunisia, the mine tailings constitute a chronic problem causing multiple environmental consequences in the basin of Medjerda river. In this paper, we are interested on the mine tailings cartography around "Djebel" (hill) Hallouf- Bouaouane mine. We propose a new method for tracking the terrain contamination evolution based on the relationship between the degree of contamination and the terrain elevation (using digital elevation model, DEM). We used the unmixing multispectral technique on the landsat ETM+ imagery for generation the land contamination map. We consider the library mineral spectra for replacing the lack of the field spectra data needed in the unmixing process. This process use as endmembers the three first principal component resulting from the principal component analysis (PCA). The given results show that the contamination degree distribution is correlated with the elevation terrain.