ProMine Mineral Databases: New Tools to Assess Primary and Secondary Mineral Resources in Europe

Abstract

A major objective of the ProMine project was to develop a Pan-EU GIS data management and visualization system for natural and man-made mineral endowment and the implementation of a Pan-EU predictive resource assessment, and thus to provide a renewed picture of European metallogeny. To reach this objective, ProMine work package 1 produced pan-European databases of primary and secondary mineral resources, the ProMine Mineral Deposit (MD) and Anthropogenic Concentration (AC) databases. The present version of the MD database contains 12,979 records (mines, deposits, occurrences or showings) and covers 34 European countries. The total number of records of the AC database is 3408. As an exhaustive inventory of mineral wastes in Europe was far beyond the scope of the project, ProMine focused on major anthropogenic concentrations (i.e. mining and ore processing wastes) and on the most interesting in terms of volume/tonnage and content (e.g. possible presence of critical metals). After briefly presenting the databases—their structure, the way they were fed and their content—the present chapter focuses on how they can allow (i) geological approaches such as the spatial and temporal distributions of commodities and/or deposit types (and, in turn, the identification of metallogenic epochs), as well as (ii) statistics calculation on the main commodities and metallogenic types present in Europe and their contribution to the EU mineral budget. In addition, it is shown that the thorough and homogeneous data contained in the MD database also allows calculation of mineral potential and predictive maps at European scale. Given the limited number of parameters—present in an homogeneous way—which can be used when working at continental scale, different methods of calculation have been adapted: for the calculation of potential, kernel density and weighting have been used, and for predictivity mapping, besides the use of the well-known Weight-of-Evidence (based on lithostratigraphy) for main commodities present in an ore deposit, a new method using metals associations has been set up for by-product commodities in formerly known deposits. Working at European scale, one should however keep in mind that such studies cannot be used for targeting. The aim is more realistically to precise or to redefine ‘district’ contours and in the best case to enhance ‘some less obvious’ areas. In order to display and to deliver data through the Internet, a web portal was developed. The ProMine web portal architecture is based, especially for metadata and web services, on OGC [Open Geospatial Consortium (http://www.opengeospatial.org/)] principles related to open architecture and interoperability. A mapping between the data stored in the ProMine databases and standard data models like GeoSciML for geological information and EarthResourceML for mineral deposits, mines and mining wastes has been implemented to deliver the data according to these international standards.