May 28, 2025
Supporting Companies Developing Mine Closure Proposals with Aerial Data and Insights
Aerial imagery and predictive insights can help mining operators identify disturbed land and quantify mitigation efforts in an automated way.
Mine Closure Plans (MCP)
Every active mine in Australia must have a Mine Closure Plan (MCP) in place. An MCP is a forward-looking plan of what happens after a mine is closed in terms of land rehabilitation and closure outcomes. An official guideline for preparing Mine Closure Plans states that every MCP must include the following site-specific information:
- A review of environmental risks related to shutting down and closing the site.
- Plans to reduce the environmental impact of each risk.
- Goals for what the land should look like after mining, based on its future use and environmental value.
- Specific targets to show those goals have been met.
- A plan to monitor the site after closure to check progress toward the goals.
- A clear method for working out how much closure will cost.
How to Account for Large Quantities of Disturbed Land
Disturbed land refers to any area of land that has been altered or impacted by mining activities, making it different from its natural or original state. These include excavated areas, waste rock, access roads, cleared vegetation, and water management structures.
DEM and Contour Measurements
MCPs require operators to account for any disturbed land, which forms the basis for individual mitigation activities. The goal is to make these sites safe for people and animals, as well as stable, non-polluting, and suitable for agreed future use. MCPs are also expected to be updated over time as new information is gathered, requiring that environmental data be collected continuously to monitor the results of ongoing mitigation activities.
The use of aerial imagery data and combined AI-based insights will help operators to map and quantify the amount of mitigation work, as well as monitor progress over time. Aerial imagery provides the basis for detailed and accurate 3D models and maps, which can be used to monitor change over time and for identifying features such as structures, vegetation, water bodies and roads. Due to their superior endurance and permission to fly at higher elevations, manned aircraft can capture large areas more effectively than drones.
These characteristics of aerial imagery make them a good fit for capturing mining sites. For example, scale is not an issue for capturing aerial imagery: some mining tenements have a combined areas upwards of 1000 sq km, which can be captured by a single aircraft over the course of a few days.
By comparing different datasets of a single site over time, it is possible to identify vegetation loss so that operators know where revegetation activities are required or study the results of ongoing revegetation. Revegetating also helps to ensure site stability by limiting erosion.
Erosion control is another important aspect of land mitigation in mining, which includes the use of physical barriers, vegetation, and engineered structures to prevent soil loss and sedimentation in waterways. Slope information helps to outline where possible erosion will occur, which is available from 3D models derived from aerial imagery or LiDAR. Machine learning utilities characterize ongoing erosion severity so that site managers can take preventive measures.
Automating Disturbance Mapping
To facilitate operators with timely, accurate, and reliable aerial imagery, Outline Global developed a disturbance mapping system that enables operators to stay up-to-date with environmental monitoring activities. This system lets customers choose which areas they want to have covered every month with aerial imagery so that they can report timely to stakeholders about their environmental monitoring efforts.
The system consists of a computer vision model for feature recognition, such as drill pads and tracks. Outline Global provides shapefiles of the automatically detected pads and tracks with detection confidence attributes, so that there’s no need to manually digitize or segment land disturbance features.
MCPs require cost estimations for eventual mine rehabilitation with aerial imagery being the critical data layer used to quantify required groundworks.
Computer-vision AI assisted modelling