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The post From a coal mine to a world-class recreational lake appeared first on The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.

Only found in the south-west of Western Australia, the Carnaby’s and Baudin’s Black-Cockatoos are currently listed as endangered while the Forest Red-Tailed Black-Cockatoo is listed as vulnerable.

Alcoa is partnering with Birdlife on the Alcoa Community Black-Cockatoo Recovery Project. The two groups are working with landowners and the broader community to raise awareness about the birds and their needs, restore critical habitat, and conduct citizen science.

Extensive studies are conducted to identify important Black-Cockatoo habitat as part of determining where bauxite mining should and should not occur across Alcoa’s lease in the Darling Range. The company has worked with government and community to further protect important areas.

Alcoa funds and assists with important research to better understand these enigmatic birds, the challenges they face, and what can be done to ensure they continue to grace our skies.

The post Stepping up to help WA’s endangered cockatoos appeared first on The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.

Necessity is frequently the mother of invention and such is definitely the case for Flora Restorer, a transformative piece of machinery that is facilitating world-class rehabilitation on a globally renowned area of native vegetation in WA.

The climate at Eneabba, where “Flora” is used, is one of the harshest you could imagine.

Three hours’ drive north of Perth, Eneabba’s average summer maximum temperatures hang around the 35-degree mark and have been known to climb as high as 48 degrees. Less than 30 mm of rain in total falls on average across December, January and February and winds regularly gust in the 30-40 kmh range, making erosion of the sandy soils a constant problem.

Against that backdrop, it’s quite remarkable what mineral sands company Iluka Resources has accomplished in restoring 18 square kilometres of Kwongan vegetation, to a point that only a carefully trained eye would notice the difference between established rehabilitated areas and untouched parts of the local environment.

It’s a journey Iluka has been on for many years but one that’s been aided greatly since Flora Restorer was pressed into action in 2019.

As Iluka Principal Rehabilitation Scientist Mark Dobrowolski explains, the machine takes a whole bunch of individual rehabilitation techniques that were already being used and combines them in a “one stop shop.”

“Flora Restorer is a sort of a one-pass piece of equipment which spreads fertiliser, scarifies the ground preparing the ground surface, and places a diverse variety of seed in on that ground – anything from as big as my thumb to a tiny little dusty seed,” Dobrowolski said.

“And then it rolls a land imprinter over it, creating a dimpled surface, before it sprays an artificial soil crust of bitumen emulsion to hold those seeds in place until it rains.

“We combined all these processes together to improve our germination of the seed we collect so carefully and treat to break dormancy, and then spread out on the ground.

“We’re trying to make sure that we get the best value for germination from that seed that we can in our rehab.”

 

While its work might be carried out away from the limelight in the Mid West, Flora Restorer has already been able to attract wider attention.

In October 2022, it was awarded the prestigious Golden Gecko Award for environmental excellence at the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety’s annual Resources Sector Awards.

 

 

Native Kwongan is prized internationally for its diversity of species and resilience to the elements. But it’s also hard to generate from scratch because of the climatic extremes.

“Since Flora Restorer came into operation we’ve been able to nearly triple the rate of germination of the seed we broadcast in rehabilitation – while using the same amount of seed,” Dobrowolski explained.

“At the same time, by combining all the techniques in the one machine, we can rehabilitate two or three times the area back to native vegetation, back to the Kwongan.

“So it’s a double whammy of increased area and increased quality of rehabilitation.”

While the efficiencies of Flora Restorer are certainly a selling point, Dobrowolski’s favourite piece of innovation on the machine is one that tackles the ever-present threat of erosion.

“Eneabba is regularly the hottest place in the State in summer – in the morning the wind blows from the east at 30kmh and then in the afternoon it blows from the south-west,” Dobrowolski said.

“The poor little plant has to survive in that windy, dry environment. It doesn’t want to get sand-blown all its life and sand drifts everywhere, so you need to control that to get those tiny little seedlings to establish.

“My favourite innovation on Flora is a combination of two very old technologies. One is land imprinting, which is a great invention by a soil scientist in the rangelands of the US named Bob Dixon.

“He invented these big rollers that are used in the western United States to dimple the land.

“Combine that in our sandy-profiled soils with bitumen emulsion crust – and I know it sounds and smells awful – but it’s great because it stabilises the land and the little plants can pop up through it and grow.

“The water pools on that surface and it doesn’t erode and gets in the ground, allowing those plants to establish.”

 

Flora’s capabilities tie in neatly with Iluka’s rehabilitation ambitions to restore the Kwongan landscape to something like how it might have looked before mining started.

The process is also strongly assisted by the company’s painstaking approach to rehabilitating the “right way.”

“Mining, for Iluka, is relatively short term and we move site-to-site,” Dobrowolski said.

“Our reputation is only as good as our last mine and that’s part of my role at Iluka, to ensure we research and adopt the best practices possible for doing rehabilitation after mining.

“In 20 years’ time, people will hopefully look across this site and just see natural Kwongan and won’t be able to see the difference between the natural vegetation and what we’ve rehabilitated.

“We aim to put back a functioning ecosystem which can self-sustain and perpetuate through life.”

To find out more about how the WA mining and resources sector is innovating now and for the future, visit safersmartercleaner.com.au 

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The post The WA invention delivering world-class rehabilitation appeared first on The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.

This isn’t just any man, mind you – he is Professor Ladislav “Laco” Mucina, a world-renowned botanist and Iluka Chair of Vegetation Science and Biogeography at Harry Butler Institute of the Perth’s Murdoch University.

And this most certainly isn’t any ordinary scrub. Rather it’s a Western Australian wonder – Kwongan, where first-glance looks certainly disguise the quite amazing diversity and hardy nature of the natural vegetation.

“It looks flat, it looks dull. It is indeed a scrub but it’s a very special scrub – one of the most precious in the world,” Mucina explained.

“The local people call it Kwongan, which in Noongar language means ‘sand plain’. All this vegetation is growing on sand. It might not look very inviting but for a biologist it’s a treasure.

“If you start poking your nose into the vegetation, you will find all sorts of forms, all sorts of colours, and all sorts of textures. Everything is different and very diverse

“If you take a plot of 10 by 10 metres, you can easily have 40 to 50 species of shrubs in that area. If you go 100 by 100 metres, you are getting 100 to 120 species.

“Let me put it into another perspective, in an area of 30 by 80 kilometres – which would be the tenement here of Iluka with its surroundings – you will have 1200 species, which is almost as much as the whole United Kingdom has.

“It’s a hot spot, with so many species packed in the one place.”

“We are looking at a hot spot not only in the number of species but also the number of strategies for how these species cope with the adversities of the environment,” Mucina said.

“The soil is very nutrient-poor and there is a lack of water. Growing in this environment you have to be tough, and you have to find a way to mine – yes, plants also mine – micro-elements or macro-elements from that soil.

“Phosphorous is a very important element, every living thing needs it to create ATP [adenosine triphosphate] which is the molecule participating in metabolic energy exchange.

“Some of the plants are using very fine roots, like a banksia. They are actually chemically mining, so they exude chemicals which help them get the phosphorous out of the soil.

“Others are using microbial life. Verticordia, which is the same family as eucalyptus, has mycorrhiza [a fungal partner] that helps it get water and nutrients.

“These kinds of relationships are very important here. In a study where we worked with a global team, looking at the relationship between standing vegetation and microbial life, we found the Kwongan had the highest functional diversity in the world.

“So these plants have the most diverse ways of feeding themselves, that you can’t find anywhere else in the world.”

Eneabba is also the location of world-class rehabilitation work on Kwongan.

For several decades from the mid-1970s, the site was a rich source of minerals sands that are frequently used in our everyday lives – namely ilmenite, zircon, and rutile.

The strip-mining technique used at Eneabba involved removing vegetation and also the top layer of soil to gain access to the mineral sands beneath.

It also leaves behind a landscape on which rehabilitation can be more easily and practically attempted than, say, a large open-cut void.

To date Iluka has rehabilitated 18 square kilometres of Kwongan at Eneabba, with that work gaining momentum over the past two years since the addition of an innovative piece of machinery known as the Flora Restorer.

Iluka’s Principal Rehabilitation Scientist Mark Dobrowolski said the company always aimed to return sites to as close to their pre-mining environment as possible.

“It’s important to get rehabilitation right scientifically because it’s got to last,” Dobrowolski said.

“We need to understand what the limitations are to reestablishing plants or controlling erosion in very different environments.

“You’re judged on your performance, so you really have to get the science right for the reputation to follow.

“In 20 years’ time, people will hopefully look across this site and just see natural Kwongan and won’t be able to see the difference between the natural vegetation and what we’ve rehabilitated.

“We aim to put back a functioning ecosystem which can self-sustain and perpetuate through life.”

Mucina says it’s impossible to perfectly replicate cleared vegetation but highly possible to reconstruct a healthy and sustainable version of Kwongan – with the right approach.

“It is possible to rehabilitate Kwongan in such a way that the system is diverse and also works sustainability on its own,” he said.

“Bringing back the vegetation using seeds, using fruits and even planting graminoids [grass-like plants] is part of the solution.

“But the best way is always to prepare the habitat to such a degree that the plants which are growing in the surroundings will find it attractive to come back.”

For Mucina, who was born in the former Czechoslovakia, moved to Austria to escape the communist regime and then spent many years living in South Africa, Australia’s native flora has a unique and enduring appeal.

“I have lived in many countries, tasted many cuisines, met many people and learned a lot of things, including something about the vegetation of the world,” he said.

“For me, this [Australia] is like a paradise. This is one of the pinnacles of my scientific life because I’m in a country which is so famous for its diversity.”

The post The WA scrub that’s an international biodiversity hot spot appeared first on The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.

Alcoa’s first WA bauxite mine, at Jarrahdale, opened in 1963. In the years that followed, mining also started at Del Park (1972), Huntly (1976) and Willowdale (1984) and the company’s operations have made a major contribution to Australia being the world’s biggest producer of bauxite. 

A lesser-known part of the story is that Alcoa successfully started rehabilitating areas of WA jarrah forest way back in 1968. 

“Over the last 50 years, we’ve really undertaken a massive program of research and development to look at how we can improve our rehabilitation,” senior research scientist Matthew Daws explains. 

“Back in the 1960s a rehabilitation approach was very simple. Since then, it’s really been a journey of continually improving the technology that we use. 

“We’ve introduced deep ripping, we’ve started landscaping the environment, we’ve discovered the importance of using fresh topsoil and undertaken a wide range of research on seeds, with a goal of aiming to restore a biodiverse functioning ecosystem.” 

That last aim is crucial for Alcoa because the forest areas where it mines contain not only more than 800 plant species but also a rich variety of fauna – including a wide range of bird life, mammals such quokkas and chuditch (western quoll) and dozens of reptile species. 

One of the key learnings of nearly 55 years  of rehabilitation work is that it is most effective when local species are at the heart of reforestation efforts. 

“Back in 1998 we changed from planting pines and Eastern States eucalypt species to only planting and seeding locally native species, particularly jarrah and marri,” Daws said. 

“We’re aiming to return as many species as we find in unmined forest – 100 per cent species richness within 15 months, something we first achieved in 2001. And that means there are as many species in the understory in our rehabilitation as in the surrounding forest.

“We’re incredibly proud that within a few years of rehabilitating sites, black cockatoo species, for example, are coming back, and are foraging and feeding in areas that we’ve rehabilitated.  

“We also return habitat features and have recorded chuditch using those as denning and nesting sites.  

“Even from the very earliest days of undertaking rehabilitation, we’re seeing species like emus come and traverse our rehabilitation.” 

On average, over the past 10 years across its WA operations, Alcoa has progressively rehabilitated approximately 600 hectares of cleared and mined land annually. 

In 2021 more than 550,000 native jarrah forest plants were planted across the Huntly and Willowdale sites. Of that planting, more than 490,000 were categorised as hard-to-grow species, while more than 1.5 tonnes of seed was spread as part of rehabilitation efforts. 

The nature of the bauxite deposit in the Darling Range – located close to surface and relatively shallow in depth – means that Alcoa is able to salvage 15cm of topsoil, something Daws said was crucial to rehabilitation. 

“Rehabilitation really starts with reshaping and landscaping areas after they have been mined,” he said. 

“That usually involves using bulldozers to reshape the area so that it fits win with the surrounding topography of the forest. 

“After that, we spread or return fresh topsoil that has been removed from areas that are about to be mined. That fresh topsoil is critical because many of the species in our rehabilitation come from it. 

“Topsoil contains the seeds of many species that would be very difficult to collect in the forest and provides an effective and cost-effect means of returning a wide range of species. 

“We’ve also discovered the importance of treating the seeds that we use in our rehabilitation to simulate the processes they experience in the natural environment – some need to be heat treated or treated with smoke to simulate signals they would receive naturally, for example when there’s a fire. 

“That helps us maximise germination in our rehabilitation.” 

Alcoa has won Golden Gecko Awards in WA for environmental excellence, been recognised internationally by the Society for Ecological Restoration and was the first mining company in the world to appear on the United Nations Environmental Program Global 500 Honour Roll. 

In 2005, Alcoa received a Certificate of Acceptance for a 975-hectare portion of its former Jarrahdale mine site which was closed in 1998 and fully rehabilitated by 2001. Alcoa was subsequently recognised for its efforts on successful mine closure with a Golden Gecko Award in 2007. 

Daws said public recognition of Alcoa’s rehabilitation was always appreciated but it was also gratifying to see the company’s workforce taking pride in what was achieved at ground level. 

“Many of our workforce live locally – they live and work in and around the jarrah forest,” he said. 

“They’re incredibly passionate about actually returning the jarrah forest in as good a state as they possibly can.  

“And they’re really proud that they can look at some of our rehabilitation and say that they’ve been involved in putting it back.” 

The post This WA forest restoration journey is 55 years in the making appeared first on The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.

Green pasture features in the foreground with an undulating wall of native forest serving as the backdrop. 

Cows graze on a trail of hay dumped by a tractor just moments earlier and a flock of black cockatoos chatter excitedly as they glide overhead towards the forest canopy. 

“It’s very satisfying,” says Iluka Resources rehabilitation superintendent Michael Blair as he absorbs the classic farming country with pride. 

“I started with Iluka when this was still agricultural land, so I’ve seen the processes from pre-mining, to mining to rehab and then back to farmland. 

“I think it’s very satisfying to see it back to what it was before.” 

Five years earlier the now unassuming parcel of land spanning 190 hectares was less at ease with its environs. 

Boasting five shallow open pits, evaporation ponds, a slew of heavy machinery and a processing plant, aerial visuals of the buzzing mining hub imposed on the gentle countryside can be jarring. 

Fast forward to 2022 and the rehabilitated Tutunup South Mineral Sands operation (Tutunup is located about 21km east of Busselton) is now indistinguishable from its surroundings.

That is no accident.

The process of rehabilitation has been executed with painstaking precision. Over a three-year period, Iluka’s rehabilitation team has successfully restored land disturbed by mining at Tutunup South back to agriculture and native vegetation, including a wetland.

And the work is not over yet with environmental monitoring ongoing.

Restoring the landscape to its former splendour entailed more than dismantling some infrastructure and shovelling soil back into the pit voids.

It started with a pre-mining assessment in 2011.

“We completed a comprehensive cultural, agricultural, flora and fauna assessment pre-mining,” explains Iluka Environmental Compliance Specialist Travis Drysdale. 

“Flora assessments identify the vegetation complexes, and you go out and target the species from those native veg complexes.  

“Seed and propagule material is collected as close to site as possible to ensure that the provenance material is maintained. 

“So we’ll work out the area of each vegetation complex that needs to be re-established and collect an appropriate amount of seed to cover that area.”

With the pre-mining assessment done, the hard work started in earnest with some digging. 

“First thing we do is we strip the topsoil to maintain that organic layer and then we stockpile that in separate stockpiles,” Blair says. 

“Then we’ll go through and take the subsoil out and stockpile that into subsoil stockpiles.  

“And then we get into the overburden – a mix of material that doesn’t have a good metals percentage in it – and pull that to one side.” 

With topsoil, subsoils and overburden sorted into subsets, mining of the rich mineral sands – used to make a myriad of everyday products from cosmetics to ceramics – was almost ready to start. 

But the environmental team at Iluka had a more complex challenge to overcome first. 

Within the mining footprint lay an envelope of wetland featuring sensitive native vegetation not suitable for seed harvesting or propagation. 

The species of plants contained in the seasonally waterlogged slopes included Leucopogon australis – an aromatic shrub with dainty white flowers endemic to southern Australia – and Cyathochaeta teretifolia, a perennial grass-like herb. 

Extremely difficult plants to propagate, the team at Iluka decided against ripping up the ground and relying on being able to seed new plants when mining finished at the end of 2018. 

Instead, they hatched an innovative plan to transplant the shrubbery to a nearby makeshift wetland nursery in late 2010. 

That required some custom-made tools. 

“The wetland was relocated with some specialist equipment we actually built and fabricated with the help of one of our local mining contractors,” Blair says. 

“We built a specialised bucket for an excavator, which works like a spatula to slide under the wetland to maintain that organic layer with the roots. 

“The wetland was then lifted and put into a specialised flat-bed mining truck and was transported to the northern nursery. 

“There, it was gently slid – to maintain all of its organic layers – off the back of the truck and onto its temporary home.” 

The temporary home was to be a more-than-a-decade-long project.

The nursery required a sloped clay-soil base, biodegradable geotextile fabric, an irrigation system and constant environmental monitoring. 

“You can imagine we’re taking a species of plant out of a wetland area where it has its feet wet for the whole year,” explains Blair. 

“We’re putting it up onto a hill where the roots are no longer in that wet layer, so we’ve had to maintain that moisture in those roots for 11 years.”  The effort was worth the work with the vegetation flourishing in its new makeshift environment. 

In the meantime, the ground below the wetland’s original site was carefully excavated. 

“The wetland was here because the ground water was hitting deep clay layers and welling up through off the scarp,” Blair says gesturing to the wetland.   

“So we’ve had to mine out ore, the overburden and the Leederville clays and then return that back to its original profile so we’re still maintaining that ground water layer to the wetland areas.” 

With the wetland returned to site last year and the vegetation surrounding it blending seamlessly into the countryside, the job was not quite done. 

Artificial hollows for the red-tailed and white-tailed black cockatoos that call the nearby trees home were carefully placed in the forest canopy to encourage a nesting habitat.  

The area will be placed under a permanent conservation covenant and be controlled under a habitat management plan that will be assessed and reported to the environmental regulators every year. 

While the nesting hollows have so far only attracted grateful possums, the cockatoos – as demonstrated by the ones that flew over on cue earlier – are evident. 

“This was a pretty good project,” Blair says with a smile.  

“It kicked all the goals.” 

The post From open pits and evaporation ponds to inviting countryside appeared first on The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.

The location is Cataby, about 150km north of Perth. The trees are a remnant of the wandoo woodland that once covered large portions of WA, from Geraldton to south coast. To the west sits Iluka’s mineral sands mine, to the east is the Brand Highway.

And the bird which Murdoch University PhD student Zoe Kissane is searching for in a tree – using a camera attached to a telescopic pole – is the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo.

“They are quite a gregarious and loud bird and a lot of people know them for the mess they make and the noises we hear from them,” Kissane explained.

“But there’s still so much we don’t know about their movement, ecology, what they are doing while they are breeding, what pieces of habitat might be really important to help sustain breeding populations ,and also where they go and what they do post-breeding.”

The Cataby mine, which opened in 2019, is Iluka’s newest in WA and was approved on the condition that permanent 180-hectare conversation covenant is created around Cataby Brook to ensure the ongoing health of the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo population that frequents the area.

Artificial nesting hollows have been created specifically for the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos and there is a long-term plan to return the land, which has previously been used for farming, to a state as close as possible to the original wandoo.

“The artificial hollows are really important because the natural hollows take so long to form,” Iluka revegetation and closure specialist Scott Talbot said.

“With fire regimes and the like, we’ve lost some of the trees [over time[] so the quickest way to reinstate habitat is to provide an artificial hollow for the birds.

“There’s so much competition from other birds and bees and the like and the artificial hollows give them more options.

“The particular artificial hollows that we use are poly tubes and they include a scratching post that means they’re designed more specifically for Carnaby’s and help exclude some competitors.

“This particular area the wandoo trees are 300 or 400 years old and it’s part of a very small catchment and very unique.

“Before mining this was farmland and cattle would come down to the creek and graze here. You can see the weeds intruding.

“Once we’ve established a covenant here you’ll see the weed load minimise, new plants growing and old plants that were once here, like orchids, coming back and re-establishing themselves to create more habitat.

“Other animals like carpet pythons, which are also a priority species, might also start to flourish.”

The longest journey recorded for a Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo is around 200km, so they aren’t the most migratory birds from a distance-travelled perspective. But it’s also extremely important for their conservation to find out as much as possible about migratory patterns, including when and where they are moving.

That’s where Murdoch researchers come in, along with some nifty solar-powered GPS and satellite tags that have been attached to a sample of the birds.

“We’ve got a little GPS tag on their back and a satellite tag on their tail feather,” Kissane said.

“The GPS tag gives us actual data of where the birds have been while the tag is on their back. While they are in the breeding ground I have a relay field set up in some trees and essentially the GPS data downloads to my computer and I can look at the tracks of where the bird has been.

“Once they leave the breeding ground, if they still have the tag on them I can follow and aim to find them at a night roost or early in the morning and set up a temporary relay field and download that data as well.

“The satellite tag gives us wider spatial movement data in terms of their roosting post-breeding ground.

“So each tag does a slightly different thing but our hope is that the GPS tag stays on as long as possible because that’s the really golden data.”

While the involvement of Murdoch with Iluka’s cockatoo conservation activities is relatively recent, Western Australian Museum has been visiting the Cataby breeding ground since 2003.

Ron Johnstone, who is a research associate at the museum but was previously its Curator of Birds for 49 years, has been studying Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos for the best part of 30 years.

“The whole centre of gravity of Carnaby’s distribution and breeding distribution has moved westwards and southwards over the past 50 years,” Johnstone said.

“And that’s something the museum has been monitoring. We have a huge historical database.”

Johnstone said Iluka had been an ideal partner to work with on cockatoo research.

“They’ve been marvellous with their environment management, particularly rehabilitation,” he said.

“We have worked with Iluka to carry out research at their operational sites at Eneabba, Cataby and Capel and…and we’ve been able to expand our cockatoo research project to include species right throughout the south-west corner.

“Iluka have had some exceptional environmental managers over the past 20 years and recently people like Scott Talbot have been really passionate about the environment. Their rehabilitation work at Eneabba [Kwongan scrub to the north that provides a foraging ground for Carnaby’s] is outstanding, probably the best in the State.

“The Cataby breeding area for Carnaby’s is very small and last year I think we only had 19 pairs breeding in that area.

“It’s a great place for us to experiment with artificial nest hollows…and it’s the only patch of wandoo and York gum in that vicinity. It’s quite a unique situation.

“These are birds that don’t breed until three or four years of age, they mate for life, they have very strong pair bonds and they return back to the same nesting highs in these ancient, veteran and stag trees.

“One of the great aspects of Cataby has been that the nests there are quite easy to access.”

Talbot says the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo population at Cataby has shown no signs of decline and that data suggests it’s actually improving since the introduction of artificial hollows and competition control.

He said one of the highlights of the monitoring project was working with birds that were “so cool.”

“I find them almost a bit prehistoric – they have a very long lineage and when you hold a chick it’s almost like holding a little dinosaur,” Talbot enthused.

“They’ve got this extraordinarily large beak, these pin feathers and this fat little belly. They’re really quite cute.

“And certainly the adults are quite communicative. The other black cockatoos I don’t think have as broad a vocabulary but the Carnaby’s you can really pick out the different conversations going on.

“It’s quite intriguing and I wonder what they are saying sometimes.”

The post Tracking and preserving the ‘little dinosaurs’ of the WA bush appeared first on The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.