ABSTRACT
Linear estimation approaches as Ordinary Kriging and Simple Kriging are widely used and successfully applied to estimate mineral resources in the mining industry, although it may generate a biased estimate of metal tonnage and ore recovery after a cutoff application. The bias is more evident in narrow veins or deposits with tight mineralization that are modeled with small blocks when the data spacing is much larger than the SMU size.
Uniform Conditioning (UC) can be used as an alternative to generate unbiased estimates for the evaluation of the potential of selective mining. The Localized Uniform Conditioning (LUC) technique has been applied to enrich the UC distribution by localizing the results at the SMUs scale. A complementary workflow using Conditional Simulations is also applied in this study to access the grade fluctuations at the SMU scale.
