Astron prepared and implemented a rehabilitation monitoring plan for a client in West Kimberley to report on progress of rehabilitation to the regulator. As the materials used from the mine for rehabilitation were vastly different from undisturbed analogue sites, the client had a unique challenge to demonstrate rehabilitation success and meeting mine closure criteria.
A conceptual monitoring framework was developed where rehabilitation success could be evaluated against the best performing rehabilitation outcomes, rather than undisturbed analogue sites. For each rehabilitation zone, the mean of the top three performing sites for a given variable was defined as the best performing rehabilitation outcome. Astron also refined the Landscape Function Analysis (LFA) method by reducing the number of measured variables that directly addressed mine closure criteria.
The results primarily addressed how the client was meeting the rehabilitation completion criteria. The design also allowed for a comparison of rehabilitation techniques informing the operator on areas of improvement for future rehabilitation planning.