A remote sensing based vegetation cover monitoring and health assessment is presented and applied to a case study of the Seyitomer Lignite Enterprise (SLE) in Kutahya, Turkey. In this study, multi-temporal Landsat TM data sets were used to assist in identifying and monitoring the progress in the rehabilitation field. Evaluation was based on analyzing varying vegetation indices. In order to monitor and track the changes, which occurred from 1987 to 2006 in vegetation condition, Simple Ratio (SR) index, Reduced Simple Ratio (RSR), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Tasseled Cap Transformation analysis were employed in the study. The vegetation indices were mapped and evaluated. The result of these analyses showed that, the region has moderate to good reclamation success. As a result, it can be concluded that, the remotely sensed data are undoubtedly useful to provide up-to-date and quick data and are cost-effective in monitoring the progress of rehabilitation for large extended regions. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.