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[music plays] (dr. alan andersen) miningoccurs throughout australia, but any individual mine isreally small, and so the total direct impacts on australia are, you know, on less than 1% of thecountry, so relatively small.

rumah minimalis tampak depan, but it's not the impacts of anindividual mine that's really the issue, it's the cumulativeimpacts of a number of mines, particularly prospective regionswhere there are a lot of mines. and often it's not thedirect impacts of the mine

sites themselves, but it'sthe indirect impacts, all the infrastructure that'sneeded to service the mines, so all the roads, the pipelines,the towns, the ports, it's that infrastructurethat often has the greater impact on biodiversitythan the mines themselves. so the best way of managingthese cumulative and indirect impacts of mining on these highlyprospective mineral regions is through a process calledstrategic regional assessment, where before all the minescome in there's a general

assessment of the biodiversityassets of the whole region, and then this can form an overall planning framework for new and prospective mines. and this has the advantage ofprotecting biodiversity in the region, but also providing cleargoal posts for the mineral industry, so they canplan their operations. so a good example of thestrategic regional assessment process is with the great barrier reef. now there's no mining onthe great barrier reef,

but there's a range ofindirect impacts of activities on the land in terms ofdredging, increased shipping traffic, coastal development,and the strategic regional planning processcan identify all the important biodiversityassets of the reef and allow the planning of thosethings to take place in the most environmentally sensitive way. mining companies now have a requirement to rehabilitate their minesites, and there's been

a strong move away fromjust greening up the area affected, to creatingsustainable ecosystems that integrate with the surrounding landscape. one of the great challengeswith mine site rehabilitation is not just doing the rehabilitating,but measuring its success. so how can we know when a minesite has been successfully rehabilitated? and in orderto do that we need to go beyond just measuring theplants, which are the things that we actually put there inthe first place, but measuring

the fauna associated withthe plants, and measuring some ecological processes thatgive us confidence that the ecosystem is in fact a healthyand properly functioning one. and one of the common ways of doingthat is to use bioindicators, so plant or animal species that arevery important in the ecosystem, and give us a generalindication of ecosystem health. and the most widely usedanimal bioindicator in the mining industry is ants. so ants are arguably themost important faunal group

in the australian environment,in terms of their sheer numbers, their role in turning overnutrients and energy flow, their role in creating soils, andtheir role in protecting and promoting plant performance,and so most of the major mine sites throughout australiahave had ant monitoring programs to measure the successof their rehabilitation efforts. and so the way it worksusing ants as bioindicators is that we monitor over timechanges in ant species at the rehabilitating sites andcompare them to what we call

benchmark or reference sites, whichare undisturbed sites in the region, and they're the goal postthat we want to get to. and as species compositionand richness converges on that in the reference sites,then we can have some sort of confidence that rehabilitationis occurring successfully. sometimes mining can have unavoidable impacts on biodiversity, but oneway of managing this is through what we call offset programs,where the impacts of biodiversity at say the minesite itself is compensated

by broader conservation programselsewhere in the region. and a really good example isthe arid recovery project as part of the olympic dammine in south australia. where the impacts of the mineitself are being compensated, and arguably more thancompensated for by this fabulous conservation programinvolving the reintroduction of all these small mammal speciesthat have become extinct over the last century in south australia. and so we're talking abouticonic species like bilbies,

and numbats, and bettongs,and stick nest rats, and so a wide range of species thatuse to occur right across arid australia, but now are extinctthroughout most of their range. and so a big feature ofthe arid recovery project is the building of thesevery, very large predator proof exclosures whereintroduced predators like cats and foxes, and other nastyintroductions like rabbits, have been removed, andall these species have been introduced and are now just thriving.

and so that's really you know afabulous conservation outcome, not just for the region, butyou know for the whole nation. the mining industry has had a prettypoor history of environmental management in the past, but things have changed now with appropriate regulation. and so with strategicenvironmental assessments, with appropriate offsetprograms, all the wealth that mines create, there'sa real opportunity for mining to have a netpositive outcome for

biodiversity in the regionsin which they operate.

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