Spatial characteristics of heavy metal pollution and the potential ecological risk of a typical mining area: A case study in China

•Using potential ecological risk assessment method to evaluate heavy metals pollution in a small-scale perspective and accurately locate the high risk regions.•The assessment domain of the Hakanson method is adjusted to obtain more precise evaluation results.•Inverse distance weighted (IDW) interpolation effectively predicts and outputs the map of the distribution of pollution for five different heavy metals.•The combination of IDW and Hakanson risk assessment is applied to evaluate the pollution situation in Suxian.