Australian Mining sat down with Dendra Systems co-founder and CEO Susan Graham to chat about the company’s 2023 growth spurt.
Founded in 2014, Dendra Systems has grown its footprint significantly in recent years as industries such as mining acquaint themselves with the company’s inspired approach to ecosystem restoration.
This has Dendra co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Susan Graham excited not only for the company’s future but also the future of sustainable mining worldwide.
“It’s been a record year for a number of customers joining us in Australia and benefiting from our unique RestorationOS approach,” Graham told Australian Mining.
“This is a reflection on our customers championing us and telling colleagues across the industry about how our approach has been able to help transform the way that they operate, and for them to achieve their own targets.”
Dendra’s RestorationOS combines ecology, data science, machine learning, and automation to restore biodiverse ecosystems at scale.
Within the Australian mining sector, this means harnessing Dendra’s drone technology, seeding solutions, end-to-end digital platform, and domain expertise to progressively rehabilitate and restore mining operations.
Graham said technology improvements over the last nine years have enabled Dendra to achieve scale improvements by a multiple of 10. In 2023 alone, the company has achieved scale improvements by a multiple of four.
“This techno-economic curve that we’re driving, where we’re able to continually increase the scale capacity that we can operate, allows our customers to operate over much larger areas and restore larger areas more effectively,” Graham said.
“As part of our restoration operating system, we’re collecting data, we’re analysing it using the best ecology insights, including AI (artificial intelligence), to then provide actionable insights.
“Whether it’s actioning with Dendra drones that go out and do the seeding, or its actioning with the weed-spraying contractors, the erosion managers or the biodiversity specialists, there’s so many people involved in restoring an ecosystem, that providing our RestorationOS platform enables the coordination of this very complex environment.”
Understanding that effective biodiversity management begins in the pre-mining phase, Liontown Resources recently engaged Dendra to monitor and survey a 2700-hectare area within its Kathleen Valley lithium project in Western Australia.
Dendra deployed its drone fleet to conduct a series of targeted surveys over existing and proposed land disturbance areas. By mapping and monitoring two priority flora species – Grevillea inconspicua and Hemingenia exilis – Dendra enabled Liontown to understand species’ abundance across the Kathleen Valley tenement.
Four weed species were also surveyed, alongside areas of erosion, habitat features, and legacy infrastructure.
“The drones collect high-resolution data, which is then processed through the Dendra platform, allowing us to determine not only current baseline data, but will also help us in the future to quickly identify any changes to Jones Creek, a culturally significant seasonal waterway and a Tjiwarl songline,” Liontown said in its 2023 ESG (environmental, social and governance) report. “The technology will enable us to identify groundwater-dependent flora and reliant terrestrial fauna species, surface water movement, and monitor soil and sediment.”
Liontown has also gained important safety insights into its Kathleen Valley tenement, with high-resolution imagery identifying legacy infrastructure that may pose safety risks; for example, uncapped drill holes from previous exploration activities were identified.
Dendra’s technology has also enabled Liontown to plan for future critical infrastructure such as determining a wind farm location based on biodiversity parameters like tree height classification.
Liontown credited Dendra’s ability to broaden and expedite ecological management.
“Traditional on-ground approaches to ecological surveys are slow and require a substantial amount of time to capture a small area of land,” Liontown said.
“Dendra’s platform and ecology-aware AI have brought together the practice of big data and AI working concurrently to not only capture the biodiversity characteristics of the entire Kathleen Valley project site, but also provide continuous monitoring so that we can see changes in the landform over time.”
Liontown has extended its use of Dendra’s technology to its Buldania lithium project in the Eastern Goldfields of WA.
Looking ahead to 2024, as Dendra evolves its RestorationOS platform, the company will continue to expand its mining customer base.
“We’re really excited about the new mining customers who are joining us and how we’re going to be able to help them,” Graham said.
“We’re opening up in two other major mining geographies, and we’ll be releasing some new platform features as part of our RestorationOS, which will mean customers will have new capabilities in terms of their experience.”
Dendra is also globalising, with a major contract in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) seeing the company redefine mangrove restoration, with a goal to restore 27 million mangroves within five years.
“We have just completed planting of a mangrove area that is more efficient than anybody has ever been able to plant before in the history of all mangrove restoration,” Graham said.
“We’ve established a Centre of Excellence for land restoration in the UAE, covering both large-scale arid and mangrove restoration projects. That will be used as a hub to export globally and allow us to restore mangrove ecosystems at a much larger scale than anybody else has been able to imagine.
“(The year) 2024 will be busy, and it will be a year of significant impact because of the scale we’re operating at and the number of people who are adopting this technology.”
As Dendra grows its footprint, Graham is seeing an Australian mining industry embracing ecosystem restoration more than ever, with increased regulation playing an important role.
“There are more than 50,000 abandoned mines in Australia, which is because regulation hasn’t always supported industry best practice,” Graham said. “But what we’re seeing now is we’ve got increasing regulation and expectations from the regulator and community to improve practices.
“Then there are global expectations around ESG reporting and requirements where shareholders and their customers – in many cases the end consumer of these materials – have increased expectations around how land is rehabilitated and is reported on.
“And what we’re also seeing is global frameworks being developed, which the mining industry is really paying attention to, such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).
“So we’re seeing this combination of regulation, ESG requirements and shareholder pressure, as well as global frameworks like the TNFD, leading the mining industry to have better practices and adopt technology to achieve better ecological outcomes.”
Facing heightened ESG pressures and more environmental regulation than ever before, Australian mining companies have the opportunity to solidify themselves as responsible operators in the eyes of not only their stakeholders and shareholders but also society as a whole.
It’s a new revolution, and one that Dendra can help facilitate quickly and efficiently.
This feature appeared in the December 2023 issue of Australian Mining.
