Benchmarking Quarry Landscapes with COTS Tools
A requirements-driven approach to end-of-mine-life reclamation
Mine closure and quarry reclamation are still too often treated as a design problem that begins at the end of operations. In practice, this framing creates unnecessary risk. Regulatory uncertainty, escalating remediation costs, and the loss of institutional knowledge over multi-decade extraction cycles all compound when landscape requirements are defined too late.
Over the past year, I have been developing and testing a different approach through my landscape advisory GEOCOG. The approach I practice treats reclamation landscapes as benchmarkable systems and uses commercially available off-the-shelf tools to define enforceable, auditable requirements long before end of mine life. It’s an early way to save costs while ensuring that you minimize headaches in the end-of-mine phases of your operations.
I presented this work at mining and geomatics summits in 2025, including two invited talks for Hexagon in Vancouver and Tucson. The response was consistent. Operators recognize the problem immediately, but few have seen a practical method for solving it without introducing new software stacks, bespoke modeling pipelines, or research-grade complexity.
This post outlines the core idea without repeating my talk verbatim.
The problem with late-stage landscape design
Most reclamation plans rely on narrative descriptions, static drawings, and generalized slope or drainage criteria. These documents satisfy permitting requirements at a high level, but they do not encode the physical logic of the landscape in a way that survives staff turnover, contractor changes, or decades of incremental extraction.
By the time end-of-mine-life landscape architects are engaged, critical decisions have already been locked in. Bench geometry, haul road alignments, overburden placement, and water routing have collectively constrained what is physically achievable. At that point, design becomes an exercise in compromise rather than compliance optimization.
The gap is not a lack of intent. It is a lack of measurable benchmarks of the original landscape.
Landscapes can be benchmarked like any other system
The central premise of my work through GEOCOG is simple. Landscapes, including post-industrial ones, can be benchmarked using the same logic applied to industrial systems, manufacturing tolerances, or infrastructure performance.
In the US, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) (1977) is the federal law governing remediation in the US, and it requires operators to return the land to the “original contours” which is incredibly difficult to comply with if you don’t have a benchmark, and leaves it open to subjective opinions about what looks natural.
Instead of asking whether a reclaimed landscape “looks natural” or “meets intent,” we can ask:
What curvature ranges define stable versus unstable slopes under site-specific material conditions?
What drainage densities and flow path geometries reliably meet erosion thresholds?
What surface roughness and microtopography ranges support revegetation under local climate constraints?
These are not abstract questions. They are measurable, repeatable, and already implicit in remediation regulations. The issue is that they are rarely formalized as requirements.
These kinds of questions will never be able to provide the kinds of answers you need if you don’t know what the landscape looked like before the project began. That’s the loop-hole by omission, and in contemporary operations with digital twin capabilities from LiDAR to 3D reconstruction from satellite-scale photogrammetry, to capture at the hand-held device level for aggregating time-stamped snapshots, this loop-hole isn’t the honorable path.
Why COTS tools matter
A key constraint I imposed on this work was the exclusive use of commercially available tools already present in mining, surveying, and planning workflows. LiDAR, photogrammetry, surface modeling platforms, GIS, and standard analysis environments are sufficient.
The goal is not to invent new software. It is to repurpose existing tools to extract benchmarks from reference landscapes and operational phases of the mine itself. To pull every last ounce of value out of tools we already have by extreme mastery of our tools, and to deploy them according to requirements-driven practices that are ontologically coherent with our operational mandates.
By analyzing existing quarry walls, benches, abandoned faces, and adjacent natural analogs, we can derive quantitative envelopes for slope curvature, drainage behavior, and surface morphology. These envelopes then become requirements, not aesthetic suggestions. At the end-of-phase decommissioning of a site, when you hand a landscape architect a benchmarked description of the landscape requirements they need to design to, you liberate them to make your site an award-winning example of how to reclaim a quarry or mine. You win the PR award by caring enough to level up your approach to reclamation.
This is not hard if you time it right. Because the tools are familiar, the method integrates cleanly into ongoing operations rather than being deferred to closure planning.
Defining requirements for future landscape architects
One of the most overlooked risks in mine reclamation is temporal distance. The landscape architect responsible for final contouring is often not the person who wrote the original closure plan or who understands why certain geometries exist.
Benchmark-driven requirements solve this by translating intent into constraints that persist.
Instead of instructing a future team to “recreate natural landforms” which is extremely ambiguous and subjective, the clear requirement becomes something like:
Maintain surface curvature within a defined range derived from benchmarked stable slopes.
Route flow paths to match benchmarked drainage densities observed under comparable conditions.
Avoid convexities or concavities shown to exceed erosion or failure thresholds.
These requirements are auditable, defensible, and regulator-legible. Not using requirements derived from a benchmark is like combining pieces from different puzzles and expecting the outcome to be meaningfully coherent. But when you start from a clear benchmark and deriving the requirements from that first state snapshot, these requirements protect operators like you by demonstrating that reclamation outcomes were constrained by validated system logic rather than subjective design choices.
From compliance to strategic advantage
What began as a compliance exercise has broader implications. Mines that benchmark their landscapes early gain operational flexibility. They can test extraction scenarios against future reclamation constraints, identify problem geometries before they are built, and reduce closure-stage surprises.
This shifts reclamation from a cost center to a form of risk management.
Said differently, not benchmarking is a risk, but it is one you can avoid, and I can show you how to do it with the tools you already have.
If you were at either of the Hexagon summits in Vancouver or Tucson, you saw examples of how GEOCOG applies standard tools to novel use cases, and what that can mean for landscape documentation, benchmarking, forensic landscape analysis, and archeological inquiry. If you weren’t there but want to discover the extensibility of your toolset to solve these new problems, I’m here to help you get started.
This shift also creates continuity. The same benchmarks used during operations become the reference framework for closure, regardless of personnel changes or ownership transitions.
Moving forward
This work is already in use as a proof-of-concept, and the interest from operators and regulators alike suggests the timing is right. As remediation regulations tighten and scrutiny increases, defensible, system-based approaches will become necessary rather than optional.
GEOCOG works directly with mines and quarries that want to formalize their reclamation requirements using existing data and tools. The focus is not on producing prettier drawings, but on encoding landscape intent in a way that survives time, scrutiny, and change.
If you are responsible for long-term land stewardship, closure planning, or regulatory risk within an extractive operation, this is a conversation worth having early.
RYAN DEWEY
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