THE WORLD CONFERENCE ON ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION

2005 The World Conference on Ecological Restoration 51
derstand the effect of existing institutional actions, regulations and enforcement mechanisms had on
long term ecological viability and/or recovery. I will present a powerpoint overview of two or three case
studies, one the “Pittsburgh Hillsides” zoning study, two the “Clean Streams” initiative and three the
“Rivertrails” project. I will show how this team of artists, scientists, planners and attorneys collaborated
on creating visual, conceptual and social “tools” that aid and abet citizen involvement in the aesthetic recovery
of the post industrial public realm.
Keywords: art, terrestrial, aquatic, mapping, radical planning, policy.
Rehabilitation os arsenical sulphidic gold mine. A case history at Stawell Gold
mine, Victoria, Australia
Comino 1 E., A.J.M. Baker 2 , A. Doronila 2 , L. Chibnall 3 , N. Casacuberta 4
1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria del Territorio, dell’Ambiente e delle Geotecnologie, Politecnico di Torino. C.so Duca degli Abruzzi,
24- 10129 Torino (Italy)
2 School of Botany, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia
3 Stawell Gold Ltd,
4 Departament Ciències Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Bellaterra (Barcelona). Spain
This project was designed to develop ecologically sustainable methods of revegetating areas impacted by
gold mining, a common resource exploitation in the state of Victoria, Australia. As toxic soils are poor or
even difficult substrates for plants to grow on, the creation of a self-sustaining vegetation community on
contaminated land requires the substrate to be suitable for plant growth. Chemical and physical analyses
of substrate samples are a fundamental part of the planning and implementation of any rehabilitation
project, providing vital information on the nutrient status, toxicity and structure of the substrates.
The aims of this research were: to evaluate the growth of plants in different concentrations of calcium
sulphate and tailings. To identify and quantify toxic metal and metalloid uptake in plants grown in different
concentrations of tailings. To define the optimum chemical and physical conditions of soil cover for
plant to grow over tailings bed. To identify chemical and physical changes in tailings after three years of
being covered with three different treatments. The data obtained from this study are used to develop a
strategy that integrates soil treatments with the selection of plant species that are tolerant to toxins or
rehabilitation of mine wastes (tailings) at Stawell Gold mine, at present the largest gold mine operating in
Victoria, Australia. The concentration of gold in the rock mined for 1km depth is about 5 g per ton. To
extract the gold, the sulphidic rocks are crushed and processed, resulting in the production of finegrained
tailings. These are pumped as a slurry into tailings lagoons and slowly dewater. The tailings are
sulphidic wastes enriched with arsenic (about 2,000 ppm) and heavy metal toxins. The results obtained
in this study, also show that tailings contain other secondary minerals aside from gypsum, further limiting
their potential as a medium for plants growth and survival.
Keywords: ecologically sustainable, gold mining, plants growth and survival.
Influence of landscape structure on the effectiveness of Spanish agrienvironment
schemes
Concepción E.D., M. Díaz, R.A. Baquero
Departamento de Ciencias Ambientales, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, E-45071 Toledo, Spain
Recent work has suggested that the failure of some agri-environment (AG) schemes to restore biodiversity
could be partially due to reduced recolonisation rates and/or source populations in simpler landscapes.
We analyse whether the effectiveness of AG schemes (i.e., increase in species richness of birds, plants,
bees, grasshoppers and spiders between paired fields with and without schemes) are influenced by landscape
traits at the field scale and at the scale of the landscape surrounding fields. Selected landscape
metrics were measured at the two scales: size and shape of focal fields and types of boundaries (field
scale), and cover of land uses, length of three types of boundaries and measures of landscape structure
in 500-m circular buffers around field centres (landscape scale). Landscape metrics were summarized by
means of three Principal Component Analyses, one for field-scale metrics and two for landscape-scale
metrics, one estimating landscape connectivity and the other the diversity and type of land uses. Species
richness and landscape traits were measured in three study areas in Spain differing in landscape complexity
(amount of natural vegetation interspersed within fields), following a sampling design developed in
the V Framework project ‘Evaluating current European agri-environment schemes to quantify and improve
nature conservation efforts in agricultural landscapes’ (EASY). Our results suggest that effects on
landscape on effectiveness of AG schemes are non-linear, including threshold values of landscape complexity
and saturation effects.
Keywords: AG schemes, landscape structure, effectiveness, biodiversity.