Hard Rock Mine Reclamation

Bruno Bussière is professor at the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT), where he holds the position of scientific director of the Research Institute on Mines and the Environment (RIME UQAT-Polytechnique) at Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT) and Chair holder of the Industrial NSERC-UQAT Chair on Mine Site Reclamation. His teaching and research activities mostly relate to mining geotechnique and hydrogeology, including constitutive and numerical modeling of unsaturated flow in soils and mine wastes, characterization of tailings and backfill behavior, passive mine water treatment, hydrogeotechnical aspects of mine wastes disposal, mine water quality prediction, mineral separation in tailings, and reclamation methods for surface disposal sites including control of acid mine drainage and contaminated neutral drainage. He has published 135 referred papers, 200 conference articles and has contributed to the training of 60 specialists. He received the 2004 CGS Colloquium award, the 2012 ADRIQ-NSERC prize for his IRC and was appointed Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 2016. Marie Guittonny-Larchevêque is a biologist and assistant professor in mine revegetation since 2013 at the research institute in mines and environment of the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue. Her research interests consist in apprehending plant and mine substrates’ relationships to ensure the success of mine site reclamation in the long term. She has 12 years of experience in research aiming at rehabilitating degraded sites. For the past six years, she has worked at overcoming the limitations of mine wastes to establish vegetation and at studying plant effects on the performance of mine reclamation methods, especially covers.