A sediment tracing study has been conducted to quantify the sediment contribution of mining versus non-mining sub-catchments in one of the first areas exploited for nickel mining, the Thio River catchment (New Caledonia). The dataset provided compiles the results of geochemical (i.e. elemental contents, X-ray fluorescence) and spectrocolorimetric (i.e. colour parameters and first derivative of reflectance spectra, spectrocolorimetry) analyses carried out on the mining and non-mining sources, Thio river sediment and artificial mixture samples.