By Tom Ver Hoeve, Product Manager, Mining & Energy at EarthDaily
VANCOUVER, Jan. 8, 2026 — Mining is entering a period of acceleration. Across countries, long-studied mineral projects are being pushed out of holding patterns and toward development as supply chain pressure, infrastructure demand and strategic mineral priorities converge.
In Canada, that shift is now explicit. Federal moves to speed up projects that have already gone through years of drilling, engineering and environmental review point to a shift in how mining is being approached.
Budget 2025 puts money behind critical minerals development and the infrastructure needed to support it, including processing and access further up the value chain. The Major Projects Office is part of the same effort, aimed at bringing more coordination to projects that tend to stall in permitting and early preparation.
This shift matters because it changes what comes next.
From Finding Resources to Delivering Projects
When mining projects move from evaluation into execution, the focus moves past the ore body to everything around it. What matters is how well a project understands the conditions it will have to build within and operate under, often for decades. How water behaves across the site. How terrain responds once roads and facilities are in place. How those conditions affect construction and long-term operations. With less room in the schedule, anticipating these factors becomes critical to keeping projects on course.
At this stage, mining begins to resemble infrastructure delivery. Design decisions are influenced by more than geology alone. Teams also have to deal with how sites behave in practice. Terrain changes through the seasons. Water moves differently once roads, pads and tailings areas are in place. In remote or climatically variable regions, those shifts can happen fast, and they are much harder to correct once construction has started.
When that uncertainty is missed, it shows up quickly in costs, safety planning and schedules. It also affects how projects are judged by regulators, lenders, nearby communities and Indigenous governments. More than ever, confidence depends on showing that site conditions are being watched and understood as they change.
Answering those questions takes more than periodic surveys. It depends on observations that are consistent and comparable over time, allowing teams to follow change as it develops rather than reacting once impacts are visible on the ground. For many projects, this longer view has become part of how readiness is judged, alongside engineering design and financial planning.
As more Canadian projects move into the development window, expectations around this kind of visibility are rising. Execution is no longer only about building quickly, but about building with enough foresight to manage risk, maintain trust and operate reliably in complex environments.
Satellite Intelligence Moves into the Core
Satellite data was once used mainly at the edges of mining workflows, often during exploration or for occasional environmental checks. Useful, but not central.
That is changing. As projects grow larger and more complex, teams are relying on satellite observation to understand how sites behave over time. Regular revisits and consistent measurements make it possible to follow changes in terrain, water movement and surface conditions as they happen, rather than relying on isolated snapshots.
When schedules are tight and sites span large, remote areas, this kind of steady visibility supports planning and risk management. What was once a specialized input is increasingly part of how modern mining projects operate.
EarthDaily works in this space by combining science-grade Earth observation data with mining-specific analysis, giving operators a clearer view of how land conditions change across exploration areas, development sites and operating mines. That continuity becomes especially valuable as projects move into execution, where small changes can carry large consequences. EarthDaily’s mining portfolio spans exploration, development and operations, reflecting the different information needs at each stage.
From Regional Context to Site-Level Decisions
Different stages of the mining lifecycle require different kinds of insight. Early in a project’s life, teams need regional context. Understanding how geological systems connect across large areas helps focus exploration and early planning.
This is where tools like Marigold from EarthDaily come into play. Instead of working through fragmented datasets, geologists can view mineral systems at full scale and get a clearer sense of how structures and alteration zones fit together. That broader context helps teams focus their fieldwork and drilling where it matters most.
Marigold spectral geology analysis applied over British Columbia’s Toodoggone region, providing wide-area insight into alteration patterns and mineral systems.
Later, as projects move into construction and operations, priorities shift. Keeping track of ground movement, surface change, and environmental conditions becomes part of day-to-day risk management.
Tools like EarthDaily’s Iris address this need by providing continuous deformation and environmental monitoring using InSAR and time-series analysis. Early signs of movement around tailings facilities, haul routes and underground areas can be identified before they surface as operational risks. Site conditions are now followed continuously, rather than being checked only at fixed points in a project’s life.
Iris deformation monitoring applied to an active gold–copper operation in British Columbia, providing frequent insight into ground stability and surface change across mine infrastructure.
What This Means for Mining in Canada
For the mining industry in Canada, this evolution carries clear implications. Projects are increasingly judged not only on resource quality, but on how well they demonstrate long-term awareness of land and environmental conditions. Consistent baselines and monitoring records are becoming standard inputs into permitting, reporting and engagement.
Data quality itself is becoming a differentiator. Reliable, comparable information reduces uncertainty in design and capital allocation. It supports better planning and helps identify issues before they become expensive to address.
Clearer development pathways can also influence exploration. When execution risks are better understood and timelines become more predictable, investment often flows upstream. Regions aligned with long-term demand may see renewed interest, supported by tools that help explorers operate efficiently and responsibly.
EarthDaily’s mining portfolio spans exploration, development and operations, reflecting the different information needs at each stage.
About Tom Ver Hoeve
Tom Ver Hoeve is Product Manager for Mining & Energy at EarthDaily. With a background in geology and seven years of experience in copper and gold exploration projects across North America, he draws on his field expertise to advance geospatial technologies for mining.
