Where technology meets nature: the tree-planting drones

31st January 2018

Alice Matthews

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We are chopping down about 15 billion trees a year and planting about nine billion. So there’s a net loss of six billion trees a year. Hand planting trees is slow and expensive. To keep pace with the tractors and bulldozers clearing vast areas of land, we need an industrial-scale solution. For example, a drone that can plant up to 100,000 trees a day.

Author: Charlotte Edmond

BioCarbon Engineering, a UK-based company backed by drone manufacturer Parrot, has come up with a method of planting trees quickly and cheaply. Not only that, trees can also be planted in areas that are difficult to access or otherwise unviable.

Planting by drone
First a drone scans the topography to create a 3D map. Then the most efficient planting pattern for that area is calculated using algorithms.

A drone loaded with germinated seeds fires pods into the ground at a rate of one per second, or about 100,000 a day. Scale this up and 60 drone teams could plant one billion trees a year.

The system’s engineers estimate that their method is about ten times faster and only 20% of the cost of hand planting. And because there is no heavy machinery involved, it’s possible to plant in hard-to-reach areas that have no roads or steep, inaccessible terrain.The BioCarbon team has tested its technology in various locations and recently trialled reseeding historic mining sites in Dungog, Australia.

Elsewhere, a similar idea is being used by Oregon start-up DroneSeed, which is attempting to create a new era of 'precision forestry' with the use of drones to plant trees as well as spray fertilizer and herbicides.

Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers for deforestation, with vast swathes of forest cleared to make way for the cultivation of crops including soy, palm oil and cocoa, as well as for beef farming.

At the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos this year, Norway announced a $400m fund to kick-start investments in deforestation-free agriculture in countries that are working to reduce their forest and peat degradation.

It is estimated that the world loses between 74,000 and 95,000 square miles of forest a year – that’s an area the size of 48 football fields lost every minute.

Original article source: World Economic Forum