Prepared by Bill Feast, Trimble, South Africa
Whitepaper – Considerations when implementing Cadastral Grids (Cell Blocks) in the Mining Sector
Executive Summary
Many countries are currently updating their Mining Laws and Regulations and a common theme in some of the new laws is the implementation on a cadastral grid to regularize the shape of mineral rights.
It is our experience that migrating licenses to a cadastral grid can actually create a negative return on investment in terms of time, money and goodwill.
While our mining cadastre solution, Trimble Landfolio for Natural Resources (previously known as FlexiCadastre), fully supports a cadastral grid system and has sophisticated tools available to create cadastral grids and migrate existing data, converting a free-form mining cadastre to a cadastral grid can present a number of challenges, and sometimes, a cadastral grid can cause more problems than it would solve.
This document outlines some of the practical challenges experienced when implementing a cadastral grid and proposes various mitigations.