Alcoa’s recent Environmental Research Symposium highlighted pioneering studies into the restoration of post-mining landscapes, with a focus on native species and sustainable land management.
More than 120 delegates from 33 organisations across Australia gathered in Perth to hear presentations from industry, government, academia, and Indigenous knowledge holders.
Curtin University PhD candidate Heidi Mippy, a Noongar and Thiin-Mah Warriyangka First Nations woman, shared insights from her research into Noongar food and medicine plants.
“We’ve got lots of good examples of two-way science where Western science has met with traditional ecological knowledge or Noongar knowledge,” Mippy said.
“What I don’t think we have are the processes for how we bring the different knowledge systems and sciences together to be able to come up with solutions or, for example, to be able to put together a land management strategy that incorporates all the important values for the future and sustainability.”
Hosted by Alcoa’s Forest Research Centre and supported by Murdoch University’s Harry Butler Institute, the conference also covered seed dormancy, surface water flow in rehabilitation, native orchid diversity and the integration of Traditional Owner knowledge in forest management.
Alcoa research manager Dr Lucy Commander praised the event’s rapid growth since its 2023 inception.
“In just two years, we’ve grown to attract some of the best minds in environmental research from around the country, and some of the most accomplished practitioners, to share their knowledge and insights,” Commander said.
“The outcome of bringing such a community together is that we gain the understanding to mutually adapt and improve our approaches to land management and to ensure long-term success to protect and restore the environment into the future.”
Former Alcoa senior research scientist Dr John Koch detailed decades of environmental research demonstrating jarrah’s successful regrowth after mining.
“From 1988, we put jarrah back in all the rehab areas and it survived very well,” Koch said. “I think one of the reasons for that was that the bauxite mining process took away that caprock layer which meant the jarrah trees were then not as prone to dieback.
“Today, there are many thousands of hectares of jarrah, much of it more than 30 years old, and those trees are doing fine.”
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