METS Ignited Collaborative Project Funds recipient Emapper has recently brought together industry partners, customers, service providers and supporters to celebrate the completion of its environmental site monitoring project in Australia.
Emapper and collaborative partners developed a multi-scale and multi-source environmental data platform to monitor, manage and reduce mining’s footprint and extend the global capability of mine site rehabilitation technology, according to METS Ignited.
METS Ignited’s industry-matched investment enabled this world-first technology to be rapidly developed and proven with strong support and engagement from customers Roy Hill and Anglo American, it said.
Emapper is an ecological restoration platform that uses UAVs, satellites, mobile field data and IoT sensors to monitor, guide and improve environmental performance. Users can identify and visualise environmental impacts and outcomes using on-demand analysis tools, selecting, procuring and deploying a variety of data sources to suit the sites, activities and requirements of the user. This allows users to produce customised compliance and management summary reports for all restoration and rehabilitation areas to plan, compare and share progress.
Across the life of the METS Ignited-backed project, Emapper has expanded its workforce from three to 10 full-time staff and increased its revenue more than 10-fold at the end of the project (September 2020), with significant growth anticipated in the next five years, METS Ignited says.
Emapper CEO, Julian Kruger, says the project funding has been foundational in bringing its ground-breaking technology to commercialisation, leading to better environmental outcomes and confirming Australia’s position as a global leader in mine rehabilitation.
“The funding helped us to reach our goal of creating a spatial analytics platform enabling faster, cheaper, safer environmental rehabilitation, by providing more data, improved results and better reporting to meet regulatory needs,” he said. “This project would not be possible without our collaborative partners Roy Hill Iron Ore Pty Ltd, Anglo American Metallurgical Coal Pty Ltd, Mount Gibson Iron Ltd, eagle.io Pty Ltd, Astron Environmental Services Pty Ltd and Solais Geoinformatics Pty Ltd.
“We are now focused on continuing to grow our Australian footprint, as well as expanding the service to international markets – everything we have learned from rolling out the platform to clients across all mining jurisdictions throughout Australia can be now applied to our international expansion.”
METS Ignited Industry Engagement Manager, Peter Clarke, says the remote capabilities of the Emapper platform continue to be advantageous to the company’s expansion.
“The great thing about Emapper is that it lets environmental managers and mine operators get amazing insights on their environmental performance whilst remaining remote,” he said. “Julian and the team have found that a number of their local clients who also operate internationally are now picking up on that opportunity.”
