Ecological Australia’s Paul Frazier, Ross Jenkins and Tieneke Trotter have completed an Australian Coal Association Research Program-funded project looking at monitoring the effect of longwall mine subsidence on native vegetation and agricultural environments.

The project focus was to improve monitoring quality and potentially reduce costs through the use of high-resolution remotely sensed data in monitoring programs.

Researchers used Rio Tinto’s Kestrel mine in the Bowen Basin, Xstrata’s Beltana mine in the Hunter Valley and BHP Illawarra Coal’s Dendrobium operation in the Illawarra as case studies to look at the effect across both native vegetation and agricultural landscapes.

The agricultural section of the project was completed early last year.

The final report to ACARP focused on the monitoring of the effects on native vegetation.

Two key datasets were used: high-resolution multi-spectral satellite imagery (Quickbird, Ikonos and Spot), and airborne laser scanning (ALS, also called Lidar).

The researchers said the multi-spectral imagery was used to develop indicators of plant health and density through the application of vegetation indices that incorporated near infrared and red light.

ALS data were used to examine information of plant structure and foliar density.

Selected field sampling using the relevant industry standard was also implemented, with remotely sensed data often used to direct the effort.

“Remotely sensed data were found to be an invaluable tool to improve the quality and repeatability of any program to monitor the consequences of LWMS on surface environments,” the researchers said in the report abstract.

“Incorporation of these datasets into the monitoring program improves monitoring repeatability and statistical design; potentially decreases any field-based assessment requirements; improves OHS aspects of field survey; and provides a synoptic, holistic dataset that can sample across an entire mining lease and offsite regions.”