Geostatistics in Resource/Reserve Estimation: A Survey of the Canadian Mining Industry Practice

With the new NI 43-101 rules of public disclosure for exploration and mining companies listed on the Canadian exchanges, it is now possible to have access to technical reports describing in details the procedures used by those companies to estimate resources and reserves for their properties in Canada and elsewhere in the world. This paper summarises the results of a survey of such technical reports issued in the last two years. It evaluates the role of geostatistics in various aspects of the resource/reserve estimation work namely the capping of outliers sample value, the domaining according to geology, the continuity analysis, the interpolation of block grades, the evaluation of dilution factors and the categorisation of resource/reserves.