The physical and chemical environmental impact in a mining area is inevitable, particularly for open pit mining areas. The impact could affect soil and water quality where mining activities, such as land clearing, blasting and hauling, occur. Thus, environmental monitoring in mining areas should be taken to measure the impact of mining activity for reclamation purposes. The objective of this research focuses on the measure of environmental impact on soil quality in terms of the nutrient content in an abandoned mine area at Jantang village, Lhoong, Aceh Besar. The research was conducted by collecting 15 soil samples, followed by laboratory analysis using atomic absorption spectrophotometry to investigate sampled 'soil's nutrients which are pH, Carbon (C-organic), Nitrogen (N-total), Phosphor (P-availability), and Ferro substance (Fe-concentration). In addition, to estimate the soil properties at locations outside the sampling area, a spatial interpolation method called inverse distance weight with an optimum power was used. The result shows that the soil is acidic, with low C-organic in the range of 0.02%–1.84%, N-total 0.02%–0.16%, and P-availability 0.55%–3.75%. In contrast, the Fe-concentration is very high, at 3000–3400 ppm.

Following the regulation of the Indonesian Government, every Mining company has an obligation to do reclamation for mining areas that had been exploited. One of the reclamation stages is re-vegetation to plant the exploited mine area with cover crops. Cover crop monitoring commonly is taken by direct assessment of plants growth. However, this approach is ineffective and also expensive which is proportional to the large reclamation area. The objective of this research is to apply remote sensing methods to monitor cover crop growth at Siltstone Quarry of PT Aroma Cipta Anugrahtama, in Lhoknga subdistrict, Aceh Besar. The monitoring was conducted using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery data by computing the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The analysis was done in a time series from the year 2019 to 2022 using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform. The result shows that the NDVI value is varied from 0 to 0,8 which is classified into no vegetation to high vegetation area. Based on spatial distribution of NDVI values, can be observed that the northern area has higher uniform NDVI value compared to the southern area which is more mixed. This indicates the southern part has been exploited earlier. Overall the re-vegetation successful rate for reclamation zone before 2019, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 are 96%, 99,5%, 70,6%, 36,6% and 6,2%.