Rehabilitation answers lie in the green data rain
Harnessing the ecological data mining companies collect can boost rehab efforts
By
Noel Dyson
24
June 2025
Technology from a Perth-based company is putting the capabilities of ecologists, machine learning engineers, statisticians, software specialists, botanists and zoologists, into a pair of products.
Tyton Ecological Intelligence was founded by Dr Cam Mounsey to develop technology to drive better environmental outcomes for business. In the mining space one of the most obvious uses is in rehabilitation.
The company has developed Tyton AI and Tyton IQ to boost organisations’ environmental monitoring and care efforts by harnessing the data they have already collected.
Mounsey founded Tyton about 10 years ago.
He had been working for a large Western Australian mining company and saw the opportunities to improve environmental monitoring.
His PhD revolved around remote sensing.
The problem was, it was difficult.
Over time the technology has improved enormously, both in terms of sensing and processing. What would require hyperspectral sensing can now be done with much lower resolution options. Advances in cloud computing have made crunching the data from those sensors much easier.
Also, the amount of data available has increased dramatically.
“What we’ve seen over the past 10 years is a confluence of aerial data from drones, aircraft and satellites,” Mounsey said.
There have also been advancements in machine learning and far greater availability of cloud computing.
Bring all those things together and a platform for improved ecological monitoring and understanding emerges.
Tyton has built two products atop that platform.
One, which claims to be the world’s first Machine Learning as a Service platform for ecologists, conservationists and environmental managers, Tyton AI, was launched a couple of weeks ago.
Earlier versions of Tyton AI were adopted by mining companies such as BHP, Fortescue, Rio Tinto and Newmont to assess environmental impacts and monitor rehabilitation. Ecologists, biodiversity specialists and Traditional Owner groups have applied the technology to support sustainability initiatives and natural resource management.
The MLaaS platform, which was eight years in development, goes further to allow whole-of-site assessments of rehabilitation areas.
Tyton also has Tyton IQ, a cloud-based analytics platform for ecological management that puts ecological data into an integrated digital ecosystem.
It includes several modules such as Monitoring, Seed, Topsoil, Flora Baseline, Fauna Baseline, Fauna Monitoring, Carbon Quantification, Plant Health and Weeds.
Tyton IQ has an artificial intelligence agent that connects and interprets data across every module to help users detect trends and uncover risks.
Mounsey believes it is this integration piece that will be a boon for mining.
“One of the things I’ve noticed is how often you see there’s lots of environmental data but it is rarely integrated,” he said.
It is not just the reams of environmental data mining companies collect, but rather discrete departments within the same mining company that do not share and integrate their own data.
As Mounsey explains, ecology is the study of interactions.
“It’s important to understand how the different elements interact,” he said.
“You need to be able to query across datasets.
“Tyton IQ aims to cover components of ecology management in a way that allows us to query across these datasets.
“When you have interacting factors it can be hard to understand what is causing a specific outcome. It’s only when you can bring datasets together that you can unpack what is happening.”
Mounsey and the Tyton team are trying to allow one ecologist to do the work of an entire multidisciplinary team.
With Tyton IQ’s AI agent that ecologist can ask intuitive questions of the data.
“We’re taking a lot of the pain out of it,” Mounsey said.
“We’re making this easier to consume and apply for environmental scientists who aren’t statisticians and help them understand the most important aspects of their sites.
“Every time we monitor a site, it’s an opportunity to learn.”
One thing Mounsey would like to see is the development of a community library of ecological data.
The more data tools such as Tyton AI and Tyton IQ have access to, the better.
Original article first published in Mining Monthly on 24 June 2025.