Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation

About the Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation

The Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation (CMLR) improves mine rehabilitation and closure outcomes by addressing the environmental challenges of the minerals industry that result from resource exploration, extraction and processing.

The Centre does this by developing sustainable and resilient ecosystems on mining waste streams, constructed landforms and other post-mining environments.

We deliver impact by providing the research, education, knowledge and capacity-building that people need to maximise the opportunities, minimise the risks, and enhance the environment (and its communities’) condition.

We deliver excellence in environmental research, education and awareness to:

the national and international minerals industry
relevant state and federal government departments
non-government organisations
local communities.

Research Expertise

Our research capabilities and expertise have developed and evolved over the years to meet the future knowledge needs of the sector and its stakeholders. Our critical research focus areas are:

Biodiversity and ecosystems.
Ecological engineering of ‘technosols’ from mine wastes.
Bio-chemical engineering of tailings and mine wastes for pollution control and sustainable rehabilitation.
Developing biotechnological solutions.

Research groups

Ecological Engineering in Mining group

Developing technologies to rehabilitate metal mine tailings and other waste domains to improve economic and ecological sustainability; produce cost-effective remediation of contaminated land; create new knowledge on the biogeochemistry of engineered tailings-soil formation, ecophysiology of native plants and ecological linkages in soil-plant systems.

Ecosystem Assessment, Restoration and Resilience group

Assessing the impacts of mining activities on flora and fauna; develop innovative approaches to restore ecosystem services and practices that encourage recolonisation by native species; examine the resilience of ecosystems under specific disturbance regimes; discover and understand the utility of metallophyte plants; create approaches for the recovery and sustainability of disturbed land.

See more on CMLR's research

Key research themes

Our research can be broadly categorised into a number research themes:

Ecological Engineering and Rehabilitation of Mine Wastes
Ecosystem structure and function
Stable landforms and sustainable substrates
Water and contaminants in the landscape
Monitoring and mapping technologies
Mine closure and end use planning

Director

Professor Peter Erskine
View Peter Erskine's profile

Leadership

Professor Longbin Huang
View Longbin Huang's profile

Associate Professor Barry Noller
View Barry Noller's profile

See all CMLR staff and students

CMLR provides opportunities for students wanting to enrol in an Honours, Masters or PhD program. The research topics available address current industry questions across multiple fields and, under the guidance of our academic researchers, students are able to make significant contributions to sustainability in mining.

Find out more about study at SMI

See available SMI higher degree by research projects

Research Support Facilities

The Centre has a range of in-house facilities to support research and postgraduate teaching. This includes:

Soil and water laboratory
Ecology laboratory
Sample preparation laboratory
Geohydrology laboratory
Herbarium
Mine site-compliant vehicle fleet
Field research equipment

Staff and students also have access to a range of analytical and microscopy services and glasshouse facilities within The University of Queensland, St Lucia campus.

For more information about the CMLR laboratories and facilities, please email cmlrlab@uq.edu.au.

Remotely Piloted Aircraft

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technologies, the Centre can determine the extent of erosion and vegetative cover across an entire site, or selected problematic areas.

Outcomes include:

Collection of RPA imagery with >80% overlap provides enough information for the generation of digital surface models (DSM). These DSM’s can be utilised by rehabilitation managers to measure landform metrics such as slope, elevation and problem areas such as erosion gullies.
A thematic vegetation coverage map may also be produced to provide spatial distribution of tree, shrub and grass cover and identify areas which are failing or developing well.

Monitoring in this manner is designed to inform management decisions in order to achieve rehabilitation outcomes that are safe, stable, self-sustaining and suited to target closure criteria in the most efficient manner possible.

CMLR Online Herbarium

The online herbarium has been developed with Silver Biology and CMLR, initially enabled as a component of an industry grant. Many projects at CMLR require simple to advanced plant identifications as a fundamental step in researching the rehabilitation of disturbed land and the effects of mining. And a number of locations where we work have limited identification resources available. The aim of the CMLR Herbarium is primarily for plant identification by staff,students and the general public by providing query-based filtering of specimens and dynamic high-resolution images, see below, as an alternative or complement to traditional forms of plant identification.

The type of specimens aim to be comprehensive site collections for long-term projects, representative collections for some mine sites in NSW and QLD and research-appropriate collection of plant specimens through other regions. A concurrent aim is to provide a demonstration of a low-cost, virtual herbarium highlighting advanced features and capabilities compatible with Australian and global herbarium online initiatives.

Since the inception of CMLR, many researchers have collected specimens across many mine sites in Queensland and New South Wales and validated many of these with botanists at the Queensland Herbarium and National Herbarium of New South Wales. But without digitisation, the specimens have been kept in the naphthalene-infused boxes and folders, with little chance of seeing the light. With significant advances in the technology of rapidly accessing high-resolution imagery combined with an image database, we’ve been able to digitise our specimen collection with relative ease. Specimen processing and digitisation was undertaken by CMLR staff, summer students and volunteers.

Contact personnel for more information: Peter Erskine (p.erskine@uq.edu.au)

Go to the CMLR Online Herbarium