The European Union Horizon 2020 project NEXT, which stands for New Exploration Technologies was created to develop new geomodels, novel sensitive exploration technologies and data analysis methods which together are fast, cost-effective, environmentally safe and, potentially more acceptable to local actors and communities. The project has now concluded: “NEXT project has been a success and it has fulfilled expectations. NEXT results have been already used by mineral exploration companies with great success,” says Scientific Coordinator Vesa Nykänen from the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK).
“We had seven work packages and 10 objectives to start with in this project. Results show that cooperations between partners have been fruitful and we have achieved excellent results in all work packages,” said Project Manager Juha Kaija from GTK. The project has been also noticed by European Commission’s Innovation Radar. Independent experts of the Innovation Radar ranked the product of the NEXT project, the Novel Electromagnetic (EM) survey system on UAV for mineral exploration, as a top innovation with high market potential in the near future. “This survey system is a remarkable result of NEXT. The Finnish SME Radai Oy started the development of it within the NEXT project and it has already proven to be highly versatile. Now they are developing the system further for commercial use,” Nykänen explains.
The other remarkable achievement of NEXT is SOM (Self-Organizing Maps) Software Tools. The aim in the project was to develop a new modern software and tools for data processing and integration. A new open-source software tool GisSOM for geoscientific data integration with combination of artificial neural works and self-organising maps is available in GitHub.
“GTK and BEAK worked together to create data fusion tools. GTK is responsible for open-source SOM software tool and BEAK is more involved to develop it for commercial use,” Nykänen explains. “The large number of publications in the project is particularly gratifying. There are more than 40 scientific articles already published or submitted in the NEXT project,” says Nykänen. All the publications will be released on open access.
Social License to Explore (SLE) is important element of nowadays exploration activities. In NEXT, two comparable case studies were conducted to find out the attitudes to the new sensitive versus the conventional exploration to achieve an understanding of the importance of sensitive exploration technologies to social licencing. One of the outcomes was the NEXT SLE Toolkit. It presents the advances in mineral exploration and the outcomes of the research on the SLE thematic in an easy-to-grasp language. The toolkit brings recommendations, which are foremost addressed to mineral exploration and mining companies, about why, how, when and where to communicate with local communities during the mineral exploration stages.
Clustering was also one of the objectives of NEXT. For this a new open-access module “Projects Map” through the EU Horizon 2020 Collaboration Network of CORDIS (The Community Research and Development Information Service) allowing to explore synergies, to optimise clustering and strategy thinking in the European “jungle”, was developed conjointly by the Publications Office of the European Union and Université de Lorraine teams.
The NEXT consortium was coordinated by the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) and consisted of 16 partners from research institutes, academia, service providers and mining industry from the six EU member states Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Malta and Spain. The Horizon 2020 €6.9 million NEXT project had its public Final Event in September 2021.