SEMINAR: Soil and Water Seminar (SEE):

Dr Clint McCullough from ECU will give a Soil and Water seminar on Oct 20th at 4pm, details below. All welcome! u.

TITLE: "Post mining lake district landscapes: what are the opportunities and how can we achieve them?"

ABSTRACT: Restoration of mining landforms has now become a well-researched practice that borrows from both disciplines of ecology and engineering to rehabilitate landscapes left completely altered by scars of earthworks often scaling across entire bioregions. However, increasingly frequent, and of growing scale, open-cut/cast mining is one mining activity that has left a legacy of many thousands of mining pit voids worldwide. Pit lakes may form in these voids, yet lake waters are often toxic to aquatic life. As a result, pit lakes are often a social and environmental liability to the surrounding region.

Avoiding these liabilities and instead developing end use opportunities for pit lakes is a new and growing field of mining restoration expertise with a number of relevant applications internationally. This talk will illustrate some of the opportunities that the new landscapes of lake districts offer to communities and the environment internationally and some of the obstacles in their development that must be considered to realise these goals.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Clint McCullough is a Senior Lecturer and Principal of the Mine Water and Environment Research (MiWER) centre based at Edith Cowan University and is also a Senior Environmental Consultant at Golder Associates (Perth). He is an Aquatic Ecotoxicologist particularly interested in what human induced water quality and habitat characteristics may be limiting aquatic life. Clint has a project history with mining projects both in Australia and internationally and is particularly interested in mine pit lakes.