Ground-breaking research into a humble native grass — including the discovery of 50 new species — may hold the key to the successful rehabilitation of mine sites in Australia.

It is a little known fact that Perth's Kings Park is a centre for world-leading research and discoveries.

For many, Kings Park is about war memorials, playgrounds and discovering Pokemon.

But the park is also the base for Dr Matt Barrett, who has found something real: 50 new species of spinifex grass.

"The more I looked the more I found," Dr Barrett said.

"It's always exciting to find something new and unrecognised and it's the thrill of the chase I guess.

"The first one was a little bit of a challenge to me because I found something I couldn't recognise and couldn't key out, it took me many years actually to be confident that I had actually found an undescribed species.

"And that's what took me deeper into the species of spinifex and trying to understand them better and better."

Spinifex only appears in Australia, occurring across 60 per cent of the nation.

Water-retaining pellets help re-establish native strains

Doctor David Merritt said there was broad recognition that more needed to be done to rehabilitate Western Australia's mining heartland of the Pilbara.

"There's been a lot of mining activity in recent times, there's relatively large areas of land that have been disturbed, there is an awareness through the mining sector, the regulators and the community that we need to improve restoration," he said.

Pellets for more effective planting programs are being made at Kings Park's special facility.

Pellets are being developed in Kings Park to seed mine sites for rehabilitation. ( ABC News: David Weber )

They can contain spinifex seeds, clay and other materials aimed at improving the grass's ability to take hold.

The technology has been developed with colleagues in the United States, working in Utah, where there were similar issues with establishment failure.

Dr Merritt has described an individual pellet as a "micro-environment", where anything could be added to aid the seed.

"They're basically different types of clay, diatomaceous earth, calcium carbonate, these kinds of base materials and then we add water absorbent polymers or gels or powders, the idea being that we can maximise water absorption and retention to improve the ability of these seeds to germinate," he said.

"We know that many seeds germinate under the ground but then fail to transition to a seedling in restoration, so what we're trying to do is improve the ability of those seeds to get over that first establishment phase."

The pellets will be going to field trials later this year and are expected to hit the sites soon afterwards.

Dr Barrett said the endemic grass could also tell us a lot about climate change.

"Spinifex has been around in Australia for 5 to 10 million years, and the number of species and where it grows right through outback Australia means it's got a record of climate change, as Australia started drying out over that time period — that's almost unequalled," he said.

"There's different spinifexes, some grow on rocks, some grow on sand and as a result of those different partitions in the landscape it has a fantastic record of those changes in those landscapes."